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THE CENTENARY 

OF THE BmTH OF 

3RaIp{) ^atoo Cmerson 

AS OBSERVED IN CONCORD MAY 25 1903 
UNDER THE DIRECTION OF 

THE SOCIAL CIRCLE IN CONCORD 



Rhodora ! if the sages ask thee why 

This charm is wasted on the earth and sky, 

Tell them, dear, that if ej-es were made for seeing, 

Then Beauty is its own excuse for being. 



JJrinteH at CI)c KibcraiHe pregg 

FOR THE SOCIAL CIRCLE IN CONCORD 

JUNE 1903 






THE LIBRARY OF 
CONORESS. 

Two Copies Recoiv0<> 

Ann 31 r903 

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66^ 77-2- 

COPV B. 



COFYRIGHT I903 BY JOHN SHEPARD KEYBS 



EMERSON 

"Wherever the English language is spoken 
throughout the world his fame is established and 
secure. . . . But we, his neighbors and townsmen, 
feel that he was ours. He was descended from the 
founders of the town. He chose our village as the 
place where his lifelong work was to be done. It 
was to our fields and orchards that his presence 
gave such value ; it was our streets in which the 
children looked up to him with love, and the elders 
with reverence. He was our ornament and pride." 

Ebexezer Rockwood Hoar, 

April SO, 1882. 



INTRODUCTION 

The proceedings recorded in this volume resulted 
from the following votes passed at a meeting of 

The Social Circle in Concord 

on December 23, 1902 : 

Voted : That the Social Circle in Concord ar- 
range a celebration of the Centenary of Ralph 
Waldo Emerson, May 25, 1903, their best beloved 
and respected member for many years. 

Voted: That the members of the Circle be a 
committee to make arrangements for the same. 



CONTENTS 

PAOB 

The Morning . 1 

Morning Introduction 3 

Address of William Lorenzo Eaton . . 5 

Address of LeBaron Russell Briggs . . 14 

The Afternoon 31 

Afternoon Introduction .... 33 

Prayer by Loren Benjamin Macdonald 34 

Address of Samuel Hoar .... 36 
Address of Charles Eliot Norton . . .45 

Address of Thomas Wentworth Higginson. 58 
Address of William James . . . .67 

Address of George Frisbie Hoar . . 78 

The Evening 95 

Evening Introduction ..... 97 

Opening Remarks, by John Shepard Keyes . 99 

Speech of Caroline Hazard .... 99 

Speech of Moorfield Storey .... 104 

Letter from James Bryce and Others . Ill 

Speech of Hugo Munsterberg .... 113 

Speech of Edward Waldo Emerson . . 119 

The Concord Hymn 128 

Appendix 129 

The Social Circle and Committees . . . 137 



THE MORNING 



EMERSON CENTENARY 

MEMORIAL EXERCISES in the Town 
Hall in Concord, Massachusetts, on the morning 
of Monday, May 25, 1903, one hundred years 
after the birth of Ralph Waldo Emerson. 
Arranged by the Social Circle, a society of 
which he was a member for forty-two years. 

1. OPENING HYMN: "The Pilgrim Fathers" 

2. INTRODUCTORY REMARKS 

By William Lorenzo Eaton 
Chairman of the Meeting 

3. RECITATIONS 

By Pupils of the High School 

4. SONG: "Ode" 

Sung in the Town Hall, Concord, July 4, 1857 

By Pupils of the High School 

5. ADDRESS 

By Le Baron Russell Briggs 

6. SONG: "Concord Hymn" 

Sung at the completion of the Battle Mon- 
ument, April 19, 1836 

By all the Schools 

7. CLOSING SONG: "Gloria" 

From Mozart's Twelfth Mass 

By Pupils of the High School 



THE EMERSON CENTENARY 



THE MORNING 



On the occasion of the celebration of the two hun- 
dredth anniversary of the settlement of Concord, Mr. 
Emerson being the orator of the day, "the children of 
the town, to the number of five hundred, moved in 
procession to the Common in front of the old church 
and Court House," and thence proceeded to the 
church. "The North Gallery had been assigned for 
them : but (it was a good omen) the children over- 
ran the space assigned for their accommodation and 
were sprinkled throughout the house and ranged in 
seats along the aisles." Following this precedent 
the Social Circle as a part of its plan for the suitable 
observance of the one hundredth anniversary of 
Mr. Emerson's birth, determined to arrange a 
morning meeting for the children of the town, in 
which they should participate. The School Commit- 
tee was requested to make May 25th a school holi- 
day, and pupils of the Grammar and High School 
grades of the public schools and their teachers were 
invited to a morning meeting in the Town Hall on 
that day. A similar invitation was extended to the 



4 THE EMERSON CENTENARY 

pupils and teachers of the Middlesex School, the 
Concord School, and Miss White's Home School. 

The pupils of these schools, to the number of six 
hundred, came together at half past ten, filling the 
hall, both floor and gallery. The children and grand- 
children of Mr. Emerson, the Social Circle, the 
School Committee of Concord, and other invited 
guests to the number of sixty or more, occupied the 
platform in the rear of the speakers. 

Thus in 1903 as in 1835 the young people of the 
town were assembled to help celebrate the day. To 
quote the special correspondent of the Springfield 
Kepublican : — 

"The Social Circle could have done nothing bet- 
ter than by bringing the children into the event of 
the town, and making them perceive that it was also 
an occasion of the world, and that they had a proper 
and, indeed, a most important part in it." 

The young people were seated punctually in the 
seats previously assigned, and the exercises opened 
with singing of "The Pilgrim Fathers" by the 
schools, under the leadership of Fred W. Archi- 
bald. 

An address was then given by William Lorenzo 
Eaton, Superintendent of Public Schools in Con- 
cord, as follows : — 



ADDRESS OF WILLIAM LORENZO EATON 5 

ADDRESS OF 
WILLIAM LORENZO EATON 

Pupils of the Concord Schools : You have been 
asked to come here to-day to participate in exercises 
in honor of Concord's foremost citizen. But he 
whom we to-day celebrate was much more than a 
citizen of Concord, for his name and fame have gone 
wherever men live and have regard for sincerity, 
and truth, and duty, and honor. Yet the Social 
Club, of which he was a member for more than forty 
years, has arranged to-day's series of memorial exer- 
cises with the feeling that in a peculiar and limited 
sense he who lived here a neighbor to your fathers and 
grandfathers belonged to this town. The gentlemen 
of this club also thought that it was fitting that the 
children of the town should have a meeting arranged 
especially for them. For you, young people, are the 
hope of your native town. Your faces are toward 
the future. To you they look to maintain the high 
ideals, to carry forward the high purposes to which 
this town has been committed for so many genera- 
tions. It is their expectation and belief that from this 
meeting you will carry away impressions of this 
great man that will help to make your lives nobler, 
and purer, and sweeter ; that there wiU descend upon 
you something of that spirit, of that radiant person- 
ality that set Emerson apart and made him a tran- 
scendent power for noble living wherever his word 
has reached. 



6 THE EMERSON CENTENARY 

His personality was indeed a radiant one ! No one 
came in contact with him during his life but felt it 
strongly and was the better for it. Those who have 
come under its influence through the printed volumes 
which he has left as a legacy to the world, feel and 
acknowledge its power. This spirit, this power, this in- 
tangible something, which fills this hall where his voice 
was heard so many times ; which pervades these streets 
in which he walked ; which rests upon these meadows 
and forests which he traversed ; which clings to his 
home where he wrought through a long and fruitful 
lifetime, has entered into the lives of all of us with 
an uplifting force that we feel, though we may not 
define. 

To you young people, as well as to your elders, must 
often come the query, What constitutes greatness ? 
Why do we accord greatness to this man and not to 
that man ? What is its test ? What the touchstone 
by which we recognize it? I suppose that you, as 
you grow older and think more deeply upon these 
matters, must come to the same conclusion that think- 
ing people always reach, that a great man is great 
because he, more clearly than any one else, expresses 
the ideals and aspirations of his age. Especially is 
this true of great poets and great statesmen. We 
all know that Abraham Lincoln was a great man. 
Now, he was a great man because he had the power 
to see, and the power to express, in clear and deci- 
sive action, what all men, at the North at least, 
were thinking and were eager to express. He became 



ADDRESS OF WILLIAM LORENZO EATON 7 

the God-given leader of the Northern conscience 
that found expression in the political action which 
has given a new and a nobler meaning to our great 
Nation. 

To Mr. Emerson, also, we must accord a leader- 
ship of the men of his age. But were he the spokes- 
man merely of his own age, and for his own age, he 
would fall short of that superlative greatness that we 
believe is now determined for him. The utterances 
of such a man become proverbial. Once they fall 
from his lips they are upon the lips of all men. 
For they reveal to all men and, at the same time, 
express for all men the truths which they have been 
feeling, and trying in vain adequately to express. 
They become the current coin of men's daily speech, 
and are used without conscious thought of their 
origin. 

You are familiar, even at your age, with some of 
this coinage. Lines which have been embodied in 
the every-day language of the people readily recur 
to your minds. I need hardly recall them to you. 
They are such as these : — 

" He builded better than he knew, 

" The conscious stone to beauty grew." 

" Beauty is its own excuse for being." 

" Pure by impure is not seen." 

" Obey thy heart." 

" When half gods go, 
The gods arrive." 

" He serves all who dares to be true." 



8 THE EMERSON CENTENARY 

" The silent organ loudest chants 
The Master's requiem." 

" What is excellent, 
As God lives is permanent." 

" Right is might throughout the world." 

" *T is man's perdition to be safe 
When for the truth he ought to die." 

Then you remember the lines which ring as a 

clarion call to every young soul who looks to live a 

noble and useful life, — 

" So nigh is Grandeur to our dust, 
So near is God to man ; 
When Duty whispers low, * Thou must ! * 
The youth replies, * I can.' " 

I need hardly say that the man who makes the 
proverbs, the current sayings, for the nation is the 
man who exerts an undisputed moral leadership 
which guides that nation onward and upward. 

I have asked you to think of Emerson as a great 
poet. Did time permit I would ask you to consider 
him as a great lecturer and essayist. Above all 
I would have you know him as a man who was 
greater than his works. I would have you under- 
stand, too, that it was the young people of his day 
who heard and heeded his message rather than their 
elders. Believing as I do that he has the same mes- 
sage for you, I urge you, therefore, young people of 
Concord, as you grow older to acquaint yourselves 
with Emerson. Go with him into the pine woods 
that he loved so well, and which whispered such 



ADDRESS OF WILLIAM LORENZO EATON 9 

secrets into his ear. Perhaps you will hear those 
secrets also. Walk over these plains with him and 
with him spend a frequent holiday on his and your 
dream-giving Indian River. Scale the hills and take 
the distant view. See Wachusett and Monadnock 
beckoning you to their heights, as they did him. 
With him gaze at the sunset. Look into that deep, 
overarching sky. Hitch your wagon to yonder star, 
and with him travel into the unexplored and unex- 
plained depths beyond. Gaze upon the rhodora where 
it blooms, and " leave it on its stalk." Watch the 
birds in their flight and where they nest, and name 
them " without a gun." Listen to the humble-bee's 
" mellow, breezy bass," and think what Emerson 
heard, and let it teach you the lesson it taught him. 
In the long winter evenings, when mayhap the snow 
is swirling around your house, and shuts you from 
the outer world, take down your volume of Emerson 
and, in " a tumultuous privacy of storm," read and 
think, and think and read, until something coming 
to you out of that great spirit shall have shaped and 
moulded your lives to nobler thought and deeds. 

I have spoken to you of some of the reasons why 
Emerson's life and teachings should interest and 
inspire you. In the main they are reasons that would 
apply to young people of your age anywhere in this 
broad land. But there are other reasons why the 
pupils in the Concord schools should have a closer 
and more personal interest in Emerson. As a boy, 
years before he came to live in Concord, he visited 



10 THE EMERSON CENTENARY 

the town. It is said that he went to our schools. 
There is a tradition that, standing on a box or barrel, 
in the corner grocery, in the store now occupied by 
Richardson's Pharmacy, he would recite poems to 
the delight of those who frequented the store. 

Later in life he did his duty on the School Com- 
mittee of the town. We have a recently found copy 
of the records of the School Committee covering 
the years from 1826 to 1842. Several pages of these 
records were written and signed by Mr. Emerson, 
as Secretary of the School Board. 

He enjoyed visiting the schools and listening to 
the children. He took a special delight in the school 
that so long was kept nearly opposite his house. The 
schoolhouse, as you know, was recently removed, 
and is now occupied by the Sloyd School, over 
whose entrance might well be placed the line from 
one of Emerson's Essays, — 

"Labor is God's education." 

He visited that schoolhouse many times when it 
was on its original site, long after his duties on the 
School Committee required such visitation. Many 
pupils of those days now recall with great delight 
and pride his visits. He was specially pleased to 
hear the boys and girls declaim, or recite poetry, for 
he regarded such exercises as an important part of 
the education of the young. A gentleman who is 
now in active business in Boston, speaking to me of 
his experiences as a boy in the school, said that Mr. 



ADDRESS OF WILLIAM LORENZO EATON 11 

Emerson, after listening awhile to the regular exer- 
cises, would, with the consent of the teacher, turn to 
him and say, " Has n't Henry something for us to- 
day?" And Henry, all charged for the expected 
invitation, would rise and recite some choice bit of 
poetry or of prose, and receive the commendation 
of his auditor. That boy's name was Wheeler, and 
since the founding of this town our schools have 
never lacked a full supply of Wheelers. So, to-day, 
in introducing to you the part of the programme 
which is to follow, I will ask a boy, whose name is 
Wheeler, if he has not something for us to-day. 

Then the following recitations were given by 
pupils of the High School : — 

Hamatreya Sermon Temple Wheeler 

Fable Agnes Louise Garvey 

Humble-bee James Joseph Loughlin 

MoNADNOCK Kenneth Thompson Blood 

Burns Edward Bailey Caiger 

The Titmouse Mildred Browne 

Let me go Lucy Tolman Hosmer 

Forbearance Warren Kendall Blodgett 

Wood-notes Roland Wortldey Butters 

Wood-notes Richard Francis Powers 

Rhodora Margaret Louise Eaton 

After the singing of the " Ode" of July 4, 1857, 
the chairman of the meeting, Mr. Eaton, introduced 
Mr. Briggs as follows : — 



12 THE EMERSON CENTENARY 

Twenty-six years ago this very month I attended 
a meeting here when this hall was filled, floor and 
gallery, not as to-day with school-children, but with 
their natural friends, their teachers. They had 
come to this town from all parts of Middlesex 
County to discuss questions pertaining to the inter- 
ests of their schools. In the course of the afternoon 
Mr. Emerson read to them a portion of his lecture 
Education. I well remember how he appeared on 
this platform and I distinctly recall his marvellous 
voice. There was a carrying power and strength in 
it the like of which I never heard in any other man. 
One passage in particular I recall, in which he 
characterized boys. It seems as if now I heard his 
voice, as he read : — 

I like boys, the masters of the playground and 
the street, — boys, who have the same liberal ticket 
of admission to all shops, factories, armories, town- 
meetings, caucuses, mobs, target-shootings, as flies 
have ; quite unsuspected, coming in as naturally as 
the janitor, — known to have no money in their 
pockets, and themselves not suspecting the value of 
this poverty ; putting nobody on his guard, but see- 
ing the inside of the show, — hearing all the asides. 
There are no secrets from them, they know every- 
thing that befaUs in the fire-company, the merits of 
every engine and of every man at the brakes, how to 
work it, and are swift to try their hands at every 
part ; so too the merits of every locomotive on the 



ADDRESS OF WILLIAM LORENZO EATON 13 

rails, and will coax the engineer to let them ride 
with him and pull the handles when it goes to the 
engine-house. They are there only for fun, and not 
knowing that they are at school, in the court-house, 
or at the cattle-show, quite as much and more than 
they were, an hour ago, in the arithmetic class. 

The committee in charge of to-day's exercises de- 
sired to find some one to address you who knew, and 
understood, and sympathized with young people. It 
was not unnatural that their thoughts at once turned 
to a man who, as a professor and an officer of Har- 
vard College, had had wide and sympathetic deal- 
ings with thousands of young men. It was known 
also that his comprehensive interest in young people 
was not confined to the young men. The doors of 
Badcliffe and Wellesley coUeges were always open 
to him, where the welcome accorded him was no less 
cordial than that which he was accustomed to ex- 
tend to the Harvard boys summoned to the Dean's 
office. I have the pleasure of introducing to you to- 
day, therefore. Professor Le Baron Russell Briggs, 
for so many years the well-known and well-beloved 
Dean of Harvard College. 



14 THE EMERSON CENTENARY 

ADDRESS OF 

LE BARON RUSSELL BRIGGS 

Now and then we meet a man who seems to live 
high above the little things that vex our lives, and 
who makes us forget them. He may speak or he 
may be silent ; it is enough that he lives and that we 
are with him. When we face him, we feel somewhat 
as we feel when we first see the ocean, or Niagara, 
or the Alps, or Athens, or when we first read the 
greatest poetry. Nothing, indeed, is more like great 
poetry than the soul of a great man ; and when the 
great man is good, when he loves everything that is 
beautiful and true and makes his life like what he 
loves, his face becomes transfigured, or, as an old 
poet used to say, " through-shine ; " for the soul 
within him is the light of the world. 

Such a great man was Emerson. He was much 
beside : he was a philosopher. Sometimes a philoso- 
pher is a man who disbelieves everything worth 
believing, and spends a great deal of strength in 
making simple things hard ; but Emerson was a 
philosopher in the best sense of the word — a lover 
of wisdom and of truth. He was also a poet ; not 
a poet like Homer who sang, but a poet like that 
Greek philosopher, Plato, who thought deep and 
high, and saw what no one else saw, and told what 
he saw as no one else could tell it. This is another 
way of saying that Emerson was a " seer." 



ADDRESS OF LE BARON RUSSELL BRIGGS 15 

To many of you he may not seem a poet, for his 
verse is often homely and rough. It has lines and 
stanzas of noble music, — 

" Out from the heart of nature rolled 
The burdens of the Bible old." 

" Still on the seeds of all he made 
The rose of beauty burns. 
Through times that wear and forms that fade 
Immortal youth returns ; " 

but seldom many of them in succession. 

" Though love repine and reason chafe, 
There came a voice without reply, — 
' 'T is man's perdition to be safe, 
When for the truth he ought to die.' " 

The first three of these lines are beyond the reach of 
most poets ; the fourth line is prose. 

" I am born a poet," he wrote to his betrothed ; 
" of a low class without doubt, yet a poet. That is 
my nature and vocation. My singing, be sure, is 
very husky, and is, for the most part, in prose." 
" He lamented his hard fate," says his biographer, 
Mr. Cabot, " in being only half a bard ; or, as he 
wrote to Carlyle, * not a poet, but a lover of poetry 
and poets, and merely serving as writer, etc, in this 
empty America before the arrival of the poets.' " 
He questioned whether to print his poems, " uncer- 
tain always," he wrote, " whether I have one true 
spark of that fire which burns in verse ; " and in a 



16 THE EMERSON CENTENARY 

little poem, called " The Test," he says that in some 
five hundred of his verses, 

" Five lines lasted, soand and true." 

When he wrote prose, he thought of a sentence by 
itself, and not of its connection with other sentences ; 
and when he wrote verse, he thought, it would seem, 
of the form of each line, without much attention to 
the form or the length of its neighbors, or even to 
its own smoothness, — he whose ear for a prose sen- 
tence was trained so delicately. 

Yet I, for one, would give up any other poetry of 
America rather than Emerson's ; and I am certain 
that one secret of his power over men and women 
was his belief that every human soul is poetry and 
a poet, and his waking of men and women to that 
belief. He had beyond other men a poet's heart ; 
and if, as Carlyle says, to see deeply is to see music- 
ally, and poetry is musical thought, he is a poet of 
poets. 

" God hid the whole world in thy heart," 

says Emerson. "The poet," he says elsewhere, 
"knows why the plain or meadow of space was 
strown with these flowers we call suns, and moons, 
and stars ; why the great deep is adorned with ani- 
mals, with men and gods." 

Nature he lived with ; and when he wrote of her, 
he wrote as one who knew her as his closest friend. 
" My book should smell of pines," he said. 



ADDRESS OF LE BARON RUSSELL BRIGGS 17 

" To read the sense the woods impart 
You must bring the throbbing heart." 

" Sheen will tarnish, honey cloy, 
And merry is only a mask of sad, 
But, sober on a fund of joy. 
The woods at heart are glad." 

" Hast thou named all the birds without a gun ?_ 
Loved the wood-rose and left it on its stalk ? 

O be my friend, and teach me to be thine." 

" Thou " [the poet], he said, " shalt have the whole 
land for thy park and manor, the sea for thy bath 
and navigation, without tax and without envy ; the 
woods and the rivers thou shalt own ; and thou shalt 
possess that wherein others are only tenants and 
boarders. Thou true land-lord! sea-lord! air-lord! 
Wherever snow falls, or water flows, or birds fly, 
wherever day and night meet in twilight, wherever 
the blue heaven is hung by clouds or sown with 
stars, wherever are forms with transparent bound- 
aries, wherever are outlets into celestial space, wher- 
ever is danger and awe and love, there is Beauty, 
plenteous as rain, shed for thee ; and though thou 
shouldst walk the world over, thou shalt not be able 
to find a condition inopportune or ignoble." 
The poet is not only a seer, he is a hearer : — 

" Let me go where'er I will 
I hear a sky-born music still : 
It sounds from all things old. 
It sounds from all things young, 



18 THE EMERSON CENTENARY 

From all that 's fair, from all that 's foul, 
Peals out a cheerful song. 
It is not oulj in the rose, 
It is not only in the bird, 
Not only where the rainbow glows, 
Nor in the song of woman heard, 
But in the darkest, meanest things 
There alwaj, alwaj something sings. 
^T is not in the high stars alone, 
Nor in the cups of budding flowers. 
Nor in the red-breast's mellow tone, 
Nor in the bow that smiles in showers, 
But in the mud and scum of things 
There alwaj, alway something sings." 

Yet it was not cheerfulness that made Emerson a 
poet ; and certainly it was not music, in the common 
understanding of the term : it was high thought, 
joined with a wonderful gift — an almost inspired 
sense — of the right word ; a gift not always his, but 
his so often that he has said more memorable things 
than any other American. You can find no higher 
simplicity in the fitting of word to thought : — 

" Though love repine and reason chafe, 
There came a voice without reply." 

While I speak of the poetry in him and the love 
of nature, let me read what he wrote to a little girl of 
thirteen who looked up to him then and always : — 

My dear Lucia : — I am afraid you think me 
very ungrateful for the good letters which I begged for 
and which are so long in coming to me, or that I am 



ADDRESS OF LE BARON RUSSELL BRIGGS 19 

malicious and mean to make you wait as long for an 
answer ; but, to tell you the truth, I have had so many 
" composition lessons " set me lately, that I am sure 
that no scholar of Mr. Moore's has had less spare 
time. Otherwise I should have written instantly ; for 
I have an immense curiosity for Plymouth news, and 
have a great regard for my young correspondent. I 
would gladly know what books Lucia likes to read 
when nobody advises her, and most of all what her 
thoughts are when she walks alone or sits alone. 
For, though I know that Lucia is the happiest of 
girls in having in her sister so wise and kind a guide, 
yet even her aid must stop when she has put the 
book before you : neither sister nor brother nor mo- 
ther nor father can think for us : in the little private 
chapel of your own mind none but God and you can 
see the happy thoughts that follow each other, the 
beautiful affections that spring there, the little silent 
hymns that are sung there at morning and at even- 
ing. And I hope that every sun that shines, every 
star that rises, every wind that blows upon you will 
only bring you better thoughts and sweeter music. 
Have you found out that Nature is always talking to 
you, especially when you are alone, though she has 
not the gift of articulate speech ? Have you found 
out what that great gray old ocean that is always in 
your sight says? Listen. And what the withered 
leaves that shiver and chatter in the cold March 
wind ? Only listen. The Wind is the poet of the 
World, and sometimes he sings very pretty summer 



20 THE EMERSON CENTENARY 

ballads, and sometimes very terrible odes and dirges. 
But if you will not tell me the little solitary thoughts 
that I am asking for, what Nature says to you, and 
what you say to Nature, at least you can tell me 
about your books, — what you like the least and 
what the best, — the new studies, — the drawing and 
the music and the dancing, — and fail not to write 
to your friend, 

R. Waldo Emerson. 

His " immense curiosity for Plymouth news " is 
not surprising ; for he wrote this letter shortly be- 
fore his marriage with Miss Jackson, of Plymouth. 
The " wise and kind " sister of his little correspond- 
ent was Miss Jackson's closest friend, and stood up 
with her at the wedding. 

Emerson was also a patriot, a man who loved his 
country, and longed for it to do right. " One thing," 
he says, " is plain for all men of common sense and 
common conscience, that here, here in America, is 
the home of man." " America is a poem in our eyes," 
" its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and 
it will not wait long for metres." 

" For He that flung the broad blue fold 
O'ermantling land and sea, 
One third part of the sky unrolled 
For the banner of the free." 

" For he that worketh high and wise 
Nor pauses in his plan, 



ADDRESS OF LE BARON RUSSELL BRIGGS 21 

Will take the sun out of the skies 
Ere freedom out of man." 

Yet his greatest patriotic poem is not the Fourth 
of July Ode, from which I have been quoting, — 

(" O tenderly the haughty day 
Fills his blue urn with fire,") 

and not the Concord Hymn, never so familiar that 
we can read without a thrill, — 

" Here once the embattled farmers stood, 
And fired the shot heard round the world." 

His greatest patriotic poem is Voluntaries, which 
treats of slavery and the conflict between North and 
South. Freedom loves the North ; — 

" The snowflake is her banner's star ; 
Her stripes the boreal streamer are." 

It is this poem that answers the terrible question ; — 

" Who shall nerve heroic boys 
To hazard all in Freedom's fight ? " 

with that mighty quatrain, — 

" So nigh is grandeur to our dust, 
So near is God to man, 
When Duty whispers low, * Thou must,* 
The youth replies, * I can.' " 

Yet Emerson is greatest, not as philosopher, poet, 
or patriot, but as helper of men. He made men 
better by simply walking among them. I have 
spoken of his face as " through-shine," as transfigured 



22 THE EMERSON CENTENARY 

with love and refinement and wisdom, with the 
vision that shall not fade, — 

" And never poor beseeching glance 
Shamed that sculptured countenance." 

It is much to remember him as I do, even in his old 
age ; to have lived with those to whom he was " Mr. 
Emerson," who had known him early, and who loved 
him as they loved no other man. Some of you may 
secretly wonder whether he was all that your elders 
have called him, — just as I used to wonder whether 
the Parthenon, the great temple at Athens, was 
not Professor Norton's building rather than mine, 
whether it would appeal to such as I. When I saw 
the Parthenon, even in its ruin, I accepted it in- 
stantly and forever ; and, if you could have seen 
Emerson, even in his enfeebled old age, you would 
have accepted him. 

" No spring nor summer's beauty hath such grace 
As I have seen in one autumnal face." 

Emerson's face was the highest and the loveliest and 
the most " through-shine," because his life was all 
this. " Is it so bad? " he wrote to a friend who had 
said that " no one would dare to uncover the thoughts 
of a single hour," — " Is it so bad ? I own that to a 
witness worse than myself and less intelligent I 
should not willingly put a window into my breast. 
But to a witness more intelligent and virtuous than 
I, or to one precisely as intelligent and well inten- 
tioned, I have no objection to uncover my heart." 



ADDRESS OF LE BARON RUSSELL BRIGGS 23 

" He was right," says Mr. Cabot, " he could only 
have gained by it." " It was good," says Hawthorne 
in a passage that Mr. Cabot quotes, " to meet him in 
the wood-paths or sometimes in our avenue with that 
pure intellectual gleam diffusing about his presence 
like the garment of a shining one ; and he, so quiet, 
so simple, so without pretension, encountering each 
man alive as if expecting to receive more than he 
would impart. It was impossible to dwell in his 
vicinity without inhaling more or less the mountain 
atmosphere of his lofty thought." 

Emerson himself has told us that '' Rectitude scat- 
ters favors on every side without knowing it, and 
receives with wonder the thanks of all people." So 
it was with him ; as it is written of one whom no 
man was more like, " There went virtue out of 
him and healed them all." He who knew sorrow 
yet was glad, who knew self-distrust yet stood self- 
reliant, who knew weakness yet remained strong, 
who knew bitterness yet kept sweet, whose love of 
man and of nature and of nature in man, shone 
through his face, and through every page he wrote, 
— he seemed to those near him the very prophet of 
God, preaching hope, freedom, courage, the glory of 
a high and simple life. " The sublime vision," he 
says, " comes to the pure and simple soul in a clean 
and chaste body." " If we live truly, we shall see 
truly. It is as easy for the strong man to be strong 
as it is for the weak to be weak." 



24 THE EMERSON CENTENARY 

" Teach me your mootl, O p.itient stars I 
Who climb each night the aucieut sky, 
Leaving on space no shade, no scars, 
No trace of age, no fear to die." 

In his presence weak men were ashamed that they 
had ever wondered whether it was worth while to 
live ; for in his presence, even in the presence of 
what he had written, it was harder to be a coward 
than to be brave. 

Of young people — not children, but young men 
and women — he was the supreme helper ; and we 
must remember that it was not only neighbors and 
friends who loved him, not only those that touched 
the hem of his garment who were made whole. His 
voice, his manner, his presence, charmed and refined 
all who came near him ; but his written words put 
courage into ten thousand hearts. 

" Trust thyself ; every heart vibrates to that iron 
string." 

" We will walk on our own feet ; we will work 
with our own hands ; we will speak our own minds." 

" K the single man plant himself indomitably on 
his instincts and there abide, the huge world will 
come round to him." 

" We are parlor soldiers. We shun the rugged 
battle of fate where strength is bom." 

" But we sit and weep in vain. The voice of the 
Almighty saith, * Up and onward forever more ! ' " 

" Man is timid and apologetic ; he is no longer 
upright ; he dares not say, * I think,' ' I am,' but 



ADDRESS OF LE BARON RUSSELL BRIGGS 25 

quotes some saint or sage. He is ashamed before 
the blade of grass or the blowing rose. These roses 
under my window make no reference to former roses 
or to better ones ; they are for what they are ; they 
exist with God to-day." 

" I call upon you, young men, to obey your heart 
and be the nobility of this land." 

Here is the star to which many an awkward and 
timid country lad has hitched his wagon ; the strong 
and steady light to which the lights that flickered in 
a thousand hearts have flashed their bravest answer. 
This gentle scholar was a man, and a man who 
inspired others with his own manliness. There was 
in his philosophy no room for the weak and lazy. 
With all his visions he had a keen sense of the 
value of time, and expressed it (with more truth 
than poetry) in " The Visit : " — 

" Askest, * How long thou shalt stay ? * 
Devastator of the day ! " 

" Do your work," he says, " and I shall know 
you. Do your work and you shall reinforce yourself. 
Do that which is assigned you, and you cannot hope 
too much or dare too much." 

" The distinction and end of a soundly constituted 
man is his labor. Use is inscribed on all his facul- 
ties. Use is the end to which he exists. As the tree 
exists for its fruit, so a man for his work. A fruitless 
plant, an idle animal, does not stand in the uni- 
verse." 



26 THE EMERSON CENTENARY 

lie believed in work that left no time for worry- 
ing:— 

*' But blest is he who playing deep yet haply asks not why, 
Too busied with the crowded hour to fear to live or die." 

And he believed in work through everything, — 

" On bravely through the sunshine and the showers I 
Time hath his work to do and we have ours." 

Such was the courage of his preaching and of his 
life. We are to be ourselves in the present, not to 
make ourselves like anybody else or like what we 
ourselves have been. If we are inconsistent, no 
matter ; if we are misunderstood, no matter. " With 
consistency,'* he says, " a great soul has simply 
nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with 
his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now 
in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow 
thinks in hard words again, though it contradict 
everything you said to-day. ' Ah, so you shall be 
sure to be misunderstood ! ' Is it so bad, then, to be 
misunderstood ? . . . Every pure and wise spirit that 
ever took flesh " has been misunderstood. 

" Whenever a mind is simple and receives a divine 
wisdom, old things pass away, — means, teachers, 
texts, temples fall; it lives now, and absorbs past 
and future into the present hour." 

" Our helm is given up to a better guidance than 
our own ; the course of events is quite too strong for 
any helmsman, and our little wherry is taken in tow 
by the ship of the great Admiral, which knows the 



ADDRESS OF LE BARON RUSSELL BRIGGS 27 

way, and has the force to draw men and states and 
planets to their good." 

And there was no room in his philosophy for the 
sickly and discontented. As one of " the first obvious 
rules of life," he says, " Get health." " And the best 
part of health," he adds, " is fine disposition. It is 
more essential than talent, even in the works of tal- 
ent. Nothing will supply the want of sunshine to 
peaches, and to make knowledge valuable, you must 
have the cheerfulness of wisdom." 

" I know how easy it is to men of the world to 
look grave, and sneer at your sanguine youth and its 
glittering dreams. But I find the gayest castles in 
the air that were ever piled far better for comfort 
and for use than the dungeons in the air that are 
daily dug and caverned out by grumbling, discon- 
tented people." 

Nor is cheerfulness for the young only : — 

" Spring still makes spring in the mind 
When sixty years are told ; 
Love wakes anew this throbbing heart 
And we are never old. 
Over the winter glaciers 
I see the summer glow, 
And through the wild-piled snow-drift 
The warm rosebuds below." 

Even though old age bring loss of power, it need 
not bring loss of cheerfulness : — 

" As the bird trims her to the gale, 
I trim myself to the storm of time 



28 THE EMERSON CENTENARY 

I man the rudder, reef the sail, 
Obey the voice at eve obeyed at prime, 
* Lowly faithful, banish fear, 
Right onward drive unharmed; 
The port, well worth the cruise, is near, 
And every wave is charmed.' " 

If disaster come, there is good in it. "We learn 
geology the morning after the earthquake.*' 

George Eliot tells us of a woman who seemed 
among other people like a fine quotation from the 
Bible in a paragraph of a newspaper. Something 
like this might be said of Emerson, who brought into 
every-day life the help that cometh from the hills. 
" I believe," says an old friend of his, " no man ever 
had so deep an influence as he had on the life and 
thought of the young people of his day. I think 
there are many who would say . . . that it has 
been one of the chief privileges of their life to have 
lived at the same time with him." 

I have tried to show you what Emerson has meant 
to American youth ; how he has stood for pure life, 
high thought, brave speech, patient and cheerful 
work ; how he found in everything poetry and a man's 
poetry, and revealed that poetry to the world : but 
this is not all. It is as easy to " put a girdle round 
about the earth in forty minutes " as to compass in 
half an hour a great man. I might speak of him as a 
forerunner of Darwin. " Man," he says, " is no up- 
start in the creation, but has been prophesied in nature 



ADDRESS OF LE BARON RUSSELL BRIGGS 29 

for a thousand, thousand ages before he appeared . . . 
His limbs are only a more exquisite organization — 
say rather the finish — of the rudimental forms that 
have been already sweeping the sea and creeping in 
the mud ; the brother of his hand is even now cleav- 
ing the Arctic sea in the fin of the whale, and innum- 
erable ages since was pawing the marsh in the flipper 
of the saurian." I might speak of his Yankee humor, 
or of his tenderness and romance, — 

«' The little Shakspeare in the maiden's heart 
Makes Romeo of a ploughboy on his cart;" 

but I purposely let them pass with this bare mention 
(as I let pass "The Titmouse," "The Rhodora," 
" The Mountain and the Squirrel," " The Humble- 
bee ") ; for I wish you this day to think of Emerson, 
living and dead, as a high and helpful friend. 
There is no better company, no better society, than 
his. Read him and re-read him. Do not try to write 
like him : he would have you write like none but 
yourselves ; and besides, his style is his and his only. 
Do not try to he like him, except so far as in being 
your best selves you come into the likeness of all who 
are good and true. When you read him, do not be 
troubled if you lose the thread of his thought ; he 
himself did that ; yet, as a young man once said of 
him, "His sayings are like the stars, which are 
scattered disorderly but together make a firmament 
of light." 

"Hundreds of people," says Raskin, "can talk 



30 THE EMERSON CENTENARY 

for one who can think ; but thousands can think for 
one who can see. To see clearly is poetry, prophecy, 
and religion all in one." 

This man who walked your streets, and loved them, 
spoke with a voice that is rare in any race or time ; 
he thought as it is given to few to think ; and he saw. 
We have had no man like him. I will not say that 
we have had none so great. Lincoln may have been 
greater. They are so different that we cannot com- 
pare the two: and yet, as Lincoln's proclamation 
brought life and hope to captive hearts, so did the 
brave word that Emerson spoke flash on the souls of 
men the truth that they were slaves no more ; that 
each misfht and must stand to his work erect and 
strong, since nature and God were his very own. 
The eyes of the blind were opened, and the ears of 
the deaf unstopped ; " for he came that they might 
have life, and that they might have it more abun- 
dantly." 

The morning exercises then closed with the ** Concord 
Hymn," sung by all the schools, and the " Gloria " from 
Mozart's Twelfth Mass, sung by pupils of the High School. 



THE AFTERNOON 



©mer0on Centenary 



MEMORIAL EXERCISES 

IN THE MEETING HOUSE 
OF THE FIRST PARISH 

IN 

CONCORD, MASSACHUSETTS 

ON 

MONDAY AFTERNOON 

MAY THE TWENTY-FIFTH 

NINETEEN HUNDRED AND THREE 

ONE HUNDRED YEARS 
AFTER THE BIRTH OF 

RALPH WALDO EMERSON 



ARRANGED BY THE SOCIAL CIRCLE 
A SOCIETY OF WHICH HE WAS A 
MEMBER FOR FORTY-TWO YEARS 



ORDER OF EXERCISES 



1. MUSIC 

Under the direction of Thomas W. Surette 

2. PRAYER 

By Rev. Loren B. Macdonald 

3. INTRODUCTORY ADDRESS 

By Samuel Hoar 

Chairman of the Meeting 

4. ADDRESS 

By Charles Eliot Norton 

5. ADDRESS 

By Thomas Wentworth Higginson 



6. A SONG OF DESTINY 

By Friedrich Holderlin 

English 'Translation by Rev. J. Troutbeck 

Music by Johannes Brahms 



" Far in yon regions of light, where pleasures fai/ not^ 

wander the Spirits blest, 
Breathed on by airs of glory, bright and divine, like a harp 

when a master hand wakes it from silence. 
Free from care like a babe that is sleeping, are they that in 

Heaven dwell. 
Pure and lowly as half opened blossoms, in those fields of 

light they ever bloom; 
And in bliss are their eyes still gazing on clearness calm 

and eternal." 

Sung by the Concord Choral Association 



7. ADDRESS 

By William James 



8. ADDRESS 

By George Frisbie Hoar 

9. SEVENTY-EIGHTH PSALM 

Sung by the Congregation 
to the tune of St, Martins 



My tongue, by inspiration taught 

Shall parables unfold ; 
Dark oracles, but understood, 

And owned for truths of old. 

Let children learn the mighty deeds 
Which God performed of old, 

Which, in our younger years, we saw. 
And which our fathers told. 

Our lips shall tell them to our sons. 

And they again to theirs ; 
That generations yet unborn 

May teach them to their heirs. 



THE AFTERNOON 

The afternoon exercises were held in the Meeting 
House of the First Parish. 

The music was under the direction of Professor 
Thomas Whitney Surette, who was also the organist 
of the occasion and liberally contributed his time 
and talents to the success of the afternoon. 

The singing was by forty members of the Concord 
Choral Association, who also gave their services. 

The Meeting House was opened at two o'clock 
for the holders of tickets, and at three o'clock for the 
general public, about eight hundred people being 
present. 

The following named sons of members of the So- 
cial Circle were ushers and assistants : — 

William Bradford Bartlett, Samuel Hoar, Jr., 

Percy Whiting Brown, Francis DeHart Houston, 

Henry Taft Eaton, Nathaniel Peabody How, 

John Marshall Eaton, Richard Jefferson Eaton, 

William Forbes Emerson, John Hoar, 

Raymond Emerson, Francis Rodman Titcomb. 

The exercises began at five minutes after three 
by the singing of Luther's hymn, ** A Mighty Fort- 
ress is our God," followed by a prayer by the Rev- 
erend Loren Benjamin Macdonald, the minister of 
the First Parish. 



34 THE EMERSON CENTENARY 

PRAYER 

BY LOREN BENJAMIN MACDONALD 

O God, we thank Thee for that Divine Wisdom 
which, from generation to generation, entering into 
holy souls, has made them friends of God and pro- 
phets. We come before Thy face deeply grateful for 
the gift of that illumined soul whose name to-day we 
honor. We thank Thee for all the blessed way in 
which Thou didst lead him. We bless Thee that, 
entering into his mind and heart, Thou didst so 
guide him in the way of truth and light and beauty, 
that, shedding down upon us to-day the greatness of 
his thought and the beauty of his spirit, we catch 
something of that divine influence and inspiration, 
and our lives are made sweeter and better because he 
has lived. 

We thank Thee, O God, that Thou didst so touch 
his heart in early youth that he was led on in de- 
vout allegiance to the spirit of truth to which he 
gave his life — that truth which brought him into 
Thy sacred presence. We thank Thee that Thy 
spirit of beauty so took possession of his soul that 
he was evermore guided by it to Thee, the source of 
all beauty. We thank Thee for that vision of right- 
eousness by which he was ever led on into the Holy 
of Holies of Thy presence. And we thank Thee that 
from that mount of vision, from that divine insight, 
he comes to us to-day to quicken our better life, to 



PRAYER BY LOREN B. MACDONALD 35 

make the world more beautiful for us, to make the 
way of life more sacred, to give us a deeper sense of 
responsibility in living, so that our lives mean more 
to us to-day because of his teaching. 

We come at this hour yielding our minds and 
hearts in gracious and loving admiration and alle- 
giance to his blessed influence. We feel the touch 
of his spirit in these sacred surroundings. We feel 
that, in these places hallowed by his presence, we 
stand on holy ground. We pray Thee that more and 
more we may feel that the beauty of the world is 
increased to us, indeed, because he has lived. Grant 
us, we pray, that, standing in the inspiration of his 
memory, with the blessed influence of his spirit 
pressing in upon our spirits, we may, indeed, follow 
in that way to which he pointed. May his spirit be 
an antidote for all our restlessness, a cure for all 
that is shallow and unworthy in our lives. May we, 
entering to-day into the silences of the spirit, feeling 
ourselves in the presence of that great Over-Soul, in 
whose presence he felt himself, be inspired, as he 
was, to go forth to do Thy work for the right, and 
to earnest labor for Thy blessed kingdom of truth 
and beauty and goodness. Make us also illumined 
souls, touched by that divine fire from above, so that 
we, too, catching some vision from the mount, may 
go forward to help bring something of the divine 
kingdom of light and peace and joy here upon the 
earth. 

We ask it all as Thy children, Amen. 



36 THE EMERSON CENTENARY 



ADDRESS OF SAMUEL HOAR 

Neighbors and Friends : — It is a rare event 
in the life of a New England town when, by a com- 
mon impulse, men pause to celebrate the anniversary 
of the birth of one of its citizens. 

With patriotic pride, and deep and tender feeling, 
we are accustomed to recur at frequent intervals to 
the pathetic story of those settlements in the wilder- 
ness, of which this in Concord was the type, and we 
note with high appreciation that what was then sown 
here in weakness has been raised in power again and 
yet again. 

And we also esteem it a priceless heritage, worthy 
of continued celebration, that when in the provi- 
dence of God it became necessary that the might of 
England should be " fronted and driven back," to 
secure the preservation of the liberty of which the 
Fathers had sown the seed, there was then found 
here the fertile field and the husbandmen ready for 
the harvest. These strengthening memories are a 
part of our local history. 

It is not, however, the least of the claims of Con- 
cord to fame that out from her loins should have 
sprung the great intellectual and spiritual leader and 
emancipator of America. 

It seems fitting that this people should commemo- 
rate Emerson on the one hundredth anniversary of 
his birth, for their history and their quiet fields 



ADDRESS OF SAMUEL HOAR 37 

furnished the alembic in which that clear and pure 
spirit was distilled. 

Of the seven men who had been ministers of this 
town before his birth, whose names are borne on 
yonder tablet, he claimed five as his kindred. It was 
the blood of Peter Bulkeley, the founder, repeating 
itself in his veins, that made him a non-conformist. 
His grandfather, William Emerson, the preacher 
of the Revolution, transmitted to him a lofty patri- 
otism. If there was found in his discourses a moving 
eloquence, it was traceable to the unquenchable spirit 
of Daniel Bliss, his great-grandfather, who came 
down here from Springfield to discipline and divide 
this people, of whom it was said that when the cele- 
brated Whitefield preached here in 1764 in the after- 
noon, and Mr. Bliss preached in the morning, " the 
Concord people thought their minister gave them 
the better sermon of the two." 

The Social Circle, of which Mr. Emerson was an 
active member for forty-two years, itself a society in 
this town which traces its origin to the Committee of 
Safety in the Revolution, acting in this behalf for 
the people of Concord, has invited you to join with 
it in this Commemoration. It has appointed me its 
mouthpiece. The summons must be obeyed, for I 
cannot disregard those voices, audible to myself alone, 
which bid me to say what I can. 

This Society, with the modesty generated by over 
one hundred and twenty years of life in Concord, re- 
calls what Emerson himself recorded of it in 1844 : 



38 THE EMERSON CENTENARY 

" Much the best society I have ever known is a 
chib in Concord called the Social Circle, consisting 
always of twenty-five of our citizens, doctor, lawyer, 
farmer, trader, miller, mechanic, etc., solidest of 
men who yield the solidest of gossip." 

It should be added that no member of the Social 
Circle now living was a member when these words 
were written. 

I suppose that a majority of this audience will 
agree that the earliest misfortune in Mr. Emerson's 
life, which, however, he did all he could to counter- 
act in after years, was that he was not born in Con- 
cord. 

The record which fixes the time of his birth 
speaks of three successive events, and is found in 
his father's diary, as follows : — 

"May 25, 1803. Mr. Puffer preached his Elec- 
tion Sermon to great acceptance. This day also, 
whilst I was at dinner at Governor Strong's, my son 
Ralph Waldo was born. Mrs. E. well. — Club at 
Mr. Adams'." 

So we, too, divide our ceremonies to-day into three 
parts : an acceptable discourse in the morning ; a 
symposium after noon ; and a meeting of the Club 
in the evening. 

His father, the Rev. William Emerson, who in 
1803 was the minister of the First Church in Bos- 
ton, died in 1811 when Ralph Waldo was eight 
years old. His mother, left a widow with six chil- 
dren and in narrow circumstances, was a woman of 



ADDRESS OF SAMUEL HOAR 39 

high character, who under great difficulties reared 
and educated her family. When they were without 
food for a day she sustained them by stories of 
heroic endurance. His grandfather, William Em- 
erson, minister of this town, builder of the Old 
Manse, in which his children were born, addressed 
and encouraged the minutemen on the Common in 
the early morning of the nineteenth of April, 1775, 
was witness and recorder of the fight at the bridge, 
joined the army at Ticonderoga as chaplain, and 
died of camp-fever in 1776. 

The only grandfather Mr. Emerson ever knew 
was Dr. Ezra Kipley, minister in this town for 
nearly sixty -three years, who married the widow of 
his predecessor and lived in the Old Manse, where 
Mr. Emerson came as a boy on frequent visits, at- 
tending school, and forming the acquaintance of the 
families of the town, and the fields, trees, and mead- 
ows which were his intimate friends during his long 
life. His biographical sketch of Dr. Kipley, pub- 
lished among the memoirs of the Social Circle, 
shows a deep appreciation of the life and character 
and manners of a sturdy New England minister of 
the old school, and does not fail to note the humor- 
ous side of its subject. 

Mr. Emerson entered Harvard College in 1817, 
was President's Freshman under President Kirkland, 
which office entitled him to a room rent free, earned 
needed money as a waiter in Commons, held several 
scholarships, withdrew with his class from college 



40 THE EMERSON CENTENARY 

in his sophomore year because some of its members 
were expelled for a fight with freshmen, returned 
and graduated about midway in his class in 1821, 
and was its class poet. He taught school, studied 
for the ministry, was ordained in 1826 and preached, 
was threatened by serious sickness, became asso- 
ciate pastor with the Rev. Henry Ware in the Sec- 
ond Church in Boston (the old church of Cotton 
Mather), separated himself therefrom in 1832, re- 
fused offers of settlement from other societies, and 
came to Concord with his mother to board at the 
Old Manse in the fall of 1834, when he was thirty- 
one years of age. 

He came to be the seer and prophet and poet, the 
teacher and the spokesman of this town. On its 
great occasions he appeared for it, and not only illu- 
mined the events of which he spoke but made those 
events vocal and perpetuated them in human mem- 
ory. His address on the two hundredth anniversary 
of the settlement of the town is easily the first of 
its kind. It should be read here to each successive 
generation on the twelfth of September, even as the 
Declaration of Independence is read in our towns on 
the Fourth of July. It was delivered on Saturday, 
September 12, 1835, when he was thirty-two years 
old. He drove to Plymouth on the fourteenth, was 
there married to Miss Lydia Jackson, and drove 
back on the fifteenth with his wife, to the house 
which he had bought on the Cambridge turnpike, to 
live there the rest of his life. 



ADDRESS OF SAMUEL HOAR 41 

Of the farm, as he called it, on which he lived, he 
subsequently wrote thus : — 

" When I bought my farm I did not know what 
a bargain I had in the blue-birds, bobolinks, and 
thrushes, which were not charged in the bill. As 
little did I guess what sublime mornings and sunsets 
I was buying, what reaches of landscape, and what 
fields and lanes for a tramp. Neither did I fully con- 
sider what an indescribable luxury is our Indian 
River, which runs parallel with the village street and 
to which every house on that long street has a back 
door which leads down through the garden to the 
river bank ; where a skiff or dory gives you all 
summer access to enchantments new every day, and 
all winter to miles of ice for the skater. Still less did 
I know what good and true neighbors I was buying : 
men of thought and virtue, some of them known the 
country through for their learning, or subtlety, or 
action, or patriotic power, but whom I had the plea- 
sure of knowing long before the country did ; and 
other men, not known widely, but known at home, 
farmers, not doctors of laws, but doctors of land, 
skilled in turning a swamp or a sandbank into a 
fruitful field, and where witch-grass and nettles grew 
causing a forest of apple-trees or miles of corn and 
rye to thrive. I did not know what groups of interest- 
ing school-boys and fair school-girls were to greet 
me in the highway, and to take hold of one's heart 
at the school exhibitions." 

In 1837 he wrote the famous hymn for the dedi- 



42 THE EMERSON CENTENARY 

cation of the Battle Monument, and compressed the 
story of the fight into the lines which are now in- 
scribed on the base of the statue of the Minuteman. 

And we take pride in the knowledge that the sub- 
lime record of his mighty thoughts has been heard 
round the world, with a potency for good at least as 
effective as the shot of the embattled farmers. 

In his old age, upon the one hundredth anniversary 
of the fight, he spoke at our great celebration, saying 
at the close, " It is a proud and tender story. I chal- 
lenge any lover of Massachusetts to read the fifty- 
ninth chapter of Bancroft's Historv without tears of 

joy." 

And what great benefactions he showered upon 
this people all his life. He gratuitously gave one 
hundred lectures before our Lyceum, or an average 
of two a year. It was sometimes irreverently said that 
he tried them on in Concord. If this were true, it is 
comforting to us to admit that they proved a good 
fit. They are themselves the record of a noble life. 
They constitute the greatest service rendered to this 
community by any single life in its history. They 
were eagerly attended by old and young. They were 
filled with lofty and inspiring thoughts, and every 
now and then came flashes of unexpected humor. 

I remember hearing as a boy a lecture of his ; the 
subject I have forgotten, its doctrines probably I 
did not appreciate ; I was no doubt charmed as always 
by the music of his voice and the felicity of his dic- 
tion. Perhaps he was arguing for concentration of 



ADDRESS OF SAMUEL HOAR 43 

effort. He turned from the pages of his manuscript, 
which, like a handful of pearls, he would seem to take 
one by one at random and discourse upon, and, hesi- 
tating a moment as he looked out upon his audience, 
smiled, and said, " No man, says the Italian proverb, 
can carry more than three watermelons under one 
arm." The memory of this anecdote served a good 
end thirty years afterward, and furnished an apt 
illustration of the helpless condition of a witness who 
had unsuccessfully ventured on a number of false- 
hoods in testifying to an important transaction. 

He was for many years on our School Committee. 
He regularly attended the town meetings and occa- 
sionally took active part in the discussions. We re- 
member his speaking words of high encouragement 
and patriotic fervor to a company of young men of 
this town who were starting for the front in the Civil 
War. These words were spoken on the Common to 
the descendants of the men for whom his grandfather 
had done a similar service on the same spot nearly 
ninety years before. 

And when the town dedicated its monument to 
those who went and did not return, we spontaneously 
turned again to the kindness which never failed us. 

He had long service on the Library Committee of 
the town. He delivered also the address at the open- 
ing of our new Public Library in 1873. 

He was a member of this Parish, had during all 
his life here a pew, in which he sat with his family 
whenever he went to church. 



44 THE EMERSON CENTENARY 

He acknowledged his own indebtedness to three 
women of high character and rare attainments, not 
of his own immediate family, — his aunt, Mary 
Moody Emerson, of whom he wrote, " she gave high 
counsels : it was the privilege of certain boys to 
have this immeasurably high standard indicated to 
their childhood, a blessing which nothing else in edu- 
cation could supply ; " Mrs. Samuel Ripley, of whom 
he said, " The kindness and genius that blend their 
light in the eyes of Mrs. Ripley inspire me with some 
feeling of unworthiness ; at least with impatience of 
doing so little to deserve so much confidence ; " and 
Elizabeth Hoar, of whom he recorded in his journal, 
" I have no other friend whom I more wish to be 
immortal than she ; an influence I cannot spare, but 
must always have at hand for recourse.'* 

Mr. Emerson was an idealist, he was the idealist 
of our time, he was " the Man thinking," but he was 
more than that to us. Where his standard was 
planted, to that height he had himself attained ; yet 
he was singularly free from self-assertion ; he sought 
for, and seemed eager to recognize, the superiority 
of others, and lived among us here as other men 
lived. It is our great felicity that he lived here. He 
bound us to him by the completeness of his character 
and the sweetness and simplicity of his life, and by 
the message of good hope which he continually gave. 
The supreme test of the neighbor proved his worth. 
Did not our own Sam Staples say of him that he 
was " a first-rate neighbor, and one who always kept 



ADDRESS OF CHARLES ELIOT NORTON 45 

his fences up " ? And he himself said, " Those of us 
who do not believe in communities, believe in neigh- 
borhoods and that the Kingdom of Heaven may con- 
sist of such." 

The Chairman then said : — 

We have invited some eminent men to speak to us 
to-day, and I take pleasure in presenting Professor 
Charles Eliot Norton, of Cambridge. 



ADDRESS OF 

CHARLES ELIOT NORTON 

Mr. Chairman, Members of the Social Circle, 
Ladies and Gentlemen of Concord and from abroad : 
It is well that this day should be celebrated through- 
out our land, for the memory of Emerson deserves 
more than mere local honor. It is well, moreover, 
because the celebration is a virtual protest against 
the prevalent spirit of materialism and militarism. 
But here, in this doubly consecrated town, the cele- 
bration, as you, Mr. Chairman, have justly said, has 
special significance and appropriateness, and you 
will not disapprove of my citing, as accordant with 
your own words, those of your honored father, Mr. 
Emerson's near friend, the " incomparable citizen," 
as he called him, the spokesman of the town at 
Emerson's funeral, when he said, in his brief and 
heartfelt address on that occasion : " We, his 



46 THE EMERSON CENTENARY 

neighbors and townsmen, feel that he was ours. He 
was descended from the founders of the town. He 
chose our village as the place where his lifelong work 
was to be done. It was to our fields and orchards that 
his presence gave such value ; it was our streets in 
which the children looked up to him with love, and 
the elders with reverence. He was our ornament 
and pride." It is becoming, then, that you, members 
of the Social Circle to which Emerson belonged for 
many years, should, above all, commemorate this an- 
niversary, and should ask others to celebrate it with 
you. I thank you for inviting me to take part in it. 

" There are always in the world," says Plato, " a 
few inspired men whose acquaintance is beyond 
price." " I am in the habit of thinking," said Mr. 
Emerson, " that to every serious mind Providence 
sends from time to time five or six or seven teachers 
who are of the first importance to him in the lessons 
they have to impart. The highest of these not so 
much give particular knowledge, as they elevate by 
sentiment, and by their habitual grandeur of view." 

And of these highest inspired men whose ac- 
quaintance is beyond price, and who elevate those 
who come into relations with them by sentiment and 
habitual grandeur of view, was Emerson himself. 
In modern times the influence of these men is dif- 
fused through their printed words, and they become 
teachers of first importance to many remote and 
unknown readers. Yet now, as in the days of Plato, 
personal acquaintance with them is beyond price. 



ADDRESS OF CHARLES ELIOT NORTON 47 

But the printed word is diuturnal, and the personal 
acquaintance transitory. For a little while the per- 
sonality of these divine men, cherished in the memo- 
ries of a few of their contemporaries, continues to 
have a twilight existence ; but before long all who 
knew them face to face have gone from the world, 
and only hearsay and tradition concerning them 
remain. 

It is an interesting and precious element of this 
commemorative occasion that so many are taking 
part in it who remember Mr. Emerson in life, and 
who bear in their hearts the image of his benignant 
presence. We, the elders, who held acquaintance 
with him to be priceless, and for whom he felt a 
kindly regard or even a friendly affection, can hardly 
do a better service for the younger generation than 
to give them, so far as may be possible, a faithful 
impression of the man himself, who exhibited in his 
daily walk and conversation a nature of ideal sim- 
plicity, dignity, and elevation. 

Emerson was fortunate in the time and place of 
his birth. I doubt if there has ever been a com- 
munity happier in its main conditions, moral and 
material, than that of Massachusetts during the 
early years of the last century. But it was essen- 
tially immature ; it had not yet secured intellectual 
independence ; its thought, its literature, its manners, 
its religion, were imported and derivative. Many 
men of vigorous character and abundant natural 
capacity were found in it ; but there were few who 



\ 

48 THE EMERSON CENTENARY ■] 

possessed originality or depth of intellect ; no poets, i 
no philosophers, no thinkers in the highest sense i 
were here ; nor were there any deep founts of learn- 
ing. 

Into this fortunate, immature, intelligent, reli- 
gious, hopeful community, Emerson was born ; born 
of admirable parents, the children of a long line of 
well-bred ancestors. He was born good, with an 
inheritance of serious-mindedness, of an intellectual 
disposition, and of religious sentiment. He was also 
born a poet, and the advantages of place and time 
of his birth gave form and direction to his poetic 
genius. Its very originality, that which distinguishes 
and individualizes it, exhibits its native source. 

The originality of genius is often a strange and 
perplexing phenomenon to the contemporaries of its 
possessor, — nor is it always understood by the man 
himself. Contemporaries fail to recognize at once 
the poet as the seer who reveals to them their own 
imperfectly developed tendencies, and expresses for 
them their own mute sentiments ; while the poet, 
familiar with the conditions in which he lives, and 
unconsciously shaped by them, may fail, for a time 
at least, to note the partial incompatibility between 
the traditional and customary order of things and 
the novel ideas revealed to his poetic vision. 

So it was with Emerson. The mass of his contem- 
poraries for a long while looked askance on him, and 
regarded his utterances with suspicion and disap- 
proval. And he himself made a long trial of the 



ADDRESS OF CHARLES ELIOT NORTON 49 

old ways before he arrived at the conviction that he 
could not follow them, but must take the independ- 
ent course dictated to him by his genius. He was 
already thirty years old when he came to full self- 
reliance. Before he was forty years old he had de- 
livered his chief message. This was no systematic 
philosophy, no dogmatic doctrine, but an individual 
interpretation of the universe, and of the life of 
man as a part of the universe. 

The essence of his spiritual teaching seems to me 
to be comprised in three fundamental articles, — 
first, that of the Unity of Being in God and Man ; 
second, that of the creation of the visible, material 
world by Mind, and of its being the symbol of the 
spiritual world ; and third, that of the identity and 
universality of moral law in the spiritual and mate- 
rial universe. These truths are for him the basis 
of life, the substance of religion, and the meaning of 
the universe. 

From the little circle of selfish interests in which 
our lives are mainly spent, Emerson lifts us into the 
great circles of the universe, from the meanness of 
personal and individual considerations into the sense 
of the large spiritual relations of even our common 
daily affairs, and makes us conscious partakers of the 
general life of the universe, part and parcel of its 
divine order. It is this that Matthew Arnold meant 
when he said so well that Emerson " is the friend 
and aider of those who live in the spirit." Holding 
nature, and man as a part of nature, to be but a 



60 THE EMERSON CENTENARY 

symbol and external manifestation of the Eternal 
and Infinite Mind, omnipresent in the form of the 
Universe, the source of its law by which it works 
always toward perfection, he cannot but be the most 
absolute of optimists. There is no pause in the flow 
of Being through the world ; everything is in a state 
of flux, and the main course of the stream is always 
forward, from good to better. 

" Through flood and sea and firmament, 
Through light, through life it forward flows." 

But truth that has been spiritually discerned must 
be spiritually interpreted. When he insists on the 
divinity in man, and bids him trust himself, it is 
not to the selfish and arrogant that he speaks, but 
to the man who is endeavoring after righteousness 
and who keeps his soul open to the influences of 
the divine essence which is its source. His optimism 
is the same with that of Ecclesiasticus : " All the 
works of the Lord are good, — so that a man cannot 
say this is worse than that, for in him they shall all 
be approved." And his teaching of self-confidence 
is taught not less by the same wise man of old: 
" In every good work trust thine own soul, for this 
is the keeping of the commandments.'* " The soul 
converses with truths," said Emerson, "that have 
always been spoken in the world." 

Emerson was of that class of men, individuals of 
which, as he says, appear at long intervals, eminently 
endowed with insight and virtue, and manifesting in 



ADDRESS OF CHARLES ELIOT NORTON 51 

every relation and expression a latent indefinable 
power, whicli is of a different and higher order than 
any talent and which compels attention and respect. 
It is the power of character, that is, of the highest 
form of the nature of the man. It is this which 
determines ultimately the extent and the strength of 
his influence. In a noble nature it exhibits itself in 
every expression. 

And if I were called on to describe Emerson in 
a single phrase, I should say that of all the men I 
have known he made the strongest impression of con- 
sistent loftiness of character. This character was no 
less manifest in familiar social relations than in his 
public discourses. His superiority was evident in the 
natural simplicity of his manners and demeanor. 
Affectation, self-consciousness, parade, were impos- 
sible to him. His habitual bearing was of sweet 
gravity and reserve, in which was no aloofness, but 
a ready responsiveness to every claim of thought or 
word of another. He was not lavish of sympathy, 
but in case of need no sympathy was more compre- 
hensive than his. He inspired affection and honor 
in every one who knew him. His presence raised the 
level of every company. 

His essays on Character, Manners, and Beha- 
vior show how penetrating and clear had been his 
observation of the ways of men, and how wise his 
conclusions from it, — but though many of the finer 
traits which he described found illustration in him- 
self, yet the secret of his superiority is hardly dis- 



62 THE EMERSON CENTENARY 

closed in them. It resided, I believe, in the fact that 
he lived more in accord with the moral order of the 
soul than other men, more as one whose soul was 
always open to the influences of the divine spirit, 
however that spirit be defined. In this was the source 
of the serenity and elevation of his own spirit, and in 
it was also the source of that clear insight into the 
significance of common life and daily trivial affairs 
which his reflections upon them and his aphorisms 
concerning them display. 

In 1870, after reading Emerson's volume entitled 
Society and Solitude, Carlyle wrote to him in well- 
chosen words : " It seems to me you are all your old 
self here, and something more. A calm insight, 
piercing to the very centre ; a beautiful sympathy, a 
beautiful epic humor ; a soul peaceably irrefragable 
in this loud-jangling world, of which it sees the ugli- 
ness, but notices only the huge new opulences (still so 
anarchic) ; knows the electric telegraph, with all its 
vulgar botherations and impertinences, accurately for 
what it is, and ditto ditto the oldest eternal Theolo- 
gies of men. All this belongs to the Highest Class 
of thought ; and again seemed to me as, in several re- 
spects, the one perfectly Human Voice I had heard 
among my fellow-creatures for a long time. And 
then the ' style,' the treatment and expression, — yes, 
it is inimitable, best — Emersonian throughout. . . . 
You have done very well ; and many will know it 
ever better by degrees." The judgment of the friend 
is confirmed by that of the new generation. 



ADDRESS OF CHARLES ELIOT NORTON 63 

My own relations with Emerson began after his 
position as poet and seer was established, not with the 
great public indeed, but with the best of his contem- 
poraries. Twenty-five years younger than he, I felt 
at first a certain hesitancy and shyness in personal 
relations with him, not only because of the disparity 
of age, and the distinction of his place in the esteem 
of worthy men, but also because my father had been 
conspicuous in opposition to the drift of his teach- 
ings and had used language of severe condemnation 
of them. It seemed to me possible that Mr. Emerson, 
though too high-minded to feel resentment toward 
an upright and high-minded opponent, might yet in- 
cline to hold back from more than merely f.ormal 
acquaintance with me. But I was mistaken. From 
the beginning of our intercourse he treated me with 
a simple graciousness and frank confidence that set 
me at ease with him, and quickened in me that affec- 
tion and reverence which I have just spoken of his 
inspiring in every one who had the happiness of 
coming into close relation with him. 

Thirty years ago this month I had the opportunity 
of seeing more of him, and of being in more constant 
relation with him than at any other time. He was 
returning with his daughter from his last visit to 
Europe, and I, with my family, was a fellow passenger 
on the steamer. There was no crowd on board ; the 
vessel was not one of the swift Leviathans of to-day. 
We had long walks together on the deck ; and in the 
evening, after the rest of the passengers had gone 



54 THE EMERSON CENTENARY 

to their berths, he and I used to sit talking together 
for an hour or two, till eleven o'clock, when the lights 
were extinguished in the deserted cabin. The visit 
to Europe and to Egypt had been undertaken, as 
some of you will remember, at the urgency of friends, 
in the belief that a change of scene and interest 
would be serviceable to him after the shock which 
he had experienced from the burning of his house in 
the summer, and the depressed condition of health 
which had followed it. It had done him all the good 
that had been hoped for, and he now seemed in 
excellent health and spirits. 

" It is rank blasphemy," said he one day, " to 
doubt anything in the universe ; everything in life 
makes for good. The moral element in man supreme, 
is progressive. Man is always better than himself. 
The world is all for happiness, and is meant for the 
happy. It is always improving. Pain and sorrow are 
of no account as compared with the joy of living ; if 
a man be overcome by them he violates the moral 
order.'* 

" The universe is not a cheat ; the beauty and the 
order of the external world are sufficient proof that 
the spiritual world is in accord with the hopes and 
instincts of man and nature for their own perfection." 

" Order, goodness, God are the one everlasting, 
self -existent fact." 

" I measure a man's intellectual sanity by his faith 
in immortality. A wise man's wish for life is in pro- 
portion to his wisdom." 



ADDRESS OF CHARLES ELIOT NORTON 55 

He would not entertain for a moment the evidence 
of ruthlessness and disorder in nature, of perversion 
of the moraL nature in men. His faith was superior 
to any apparent exceptions to his doctrine ; all of them 
could be brought into accordance with it. 

In our long evening talks he told me much of his 
early life. He was often in a mood of reminiscence, 
and in the retrospect all life lay fair behind him, like 
a pleasant landscape illumined by the slowly sinking 
sun. The sweetness and purity and elevation of his 
nature were manifest in his recollections, and his 
vision of the past was that not only of the poet, but 
of the good man who had gained from life the best 
it can afford. He returned over and over again to the 
happiness of life and the joy of existence. He had 
been very fortunate in his times. 

The 25th of May, his seventieth birthday, was 
the last day before the voyage ended. When I 
greeted him in the morning, he replied with a plea- 
sant semi-humorous smile, and with a blush like a 
youth, " You are too good with all these kind words, 
but the day is a melancholy one for me, for I count 
this seventieth birthday as the close of youth ! " He 
had been reading with great interest on the voyage 
the quatrains of Omar Khayyam, and one of them 
may have been lingering in his mind : — 

" Yet Oh ! that Spring should vanish with the Rose! 
That Youth's sweet-scented manuscript should close ! 
The nightingale that in the branches sang, 
Ah whence, and whither flown again, who knows ? " 



56 THE EMERSON CENTENARY 

But my thoughts fell back to his own Terminus^ 
written ten years before ; not so much to its opening 
words, " It is time to grow old," but rather to the 
verses with which it ends : — 

" As the bird trims her to the gale, 
I trim myself to the storm of time, 
I man the rudder, reef the sail, 
Obey the voice at eve obeyed at prime ; 
Lowly faithful, banish fear. 
Right onward drive unharmed; 
The port, well worth the cruise, is near, 
And every wave is charmed." 

One day, a day of rough waves and lowering skies, 
as we walked the deck, he spoke of the stout hearts 
of the early mariners, sailing the untracked seas. 
" How, in Heaven's name, did Columbus get over ? " 
as Clough asks. " Not so much of a wonder after 
all," said Emerson ; " Columbus had his compass, and 
that was enough for such a soul as his ; there was 
the miracle of the magnet, the witness of the divine 
spirit in nature, type of the eternal control of matter 
by spirit, of fidelity to the unseen and the ideal. I 
always carry with me a little compass," and taking 
it from his pocket, he added, " I like to hold the god 
in my hand." 

He lived for nine years after his return home. 
Some of you remember his gently declining days. 
The evening mists steadily gathered about him, but 
while they gradually obscured the light of his mind, 
they were still suffused by the unquenched glow of 
his spirit. His sweetness, his faith never failed. 



ADDRESS OF CHARLES ELIOT NORTON 57 

On the last occasion that I saw him at his own 
house his powers of recollection were imperfect, but 
his gracious benignity was unchanged. His talk had 
its old tone, though the intermittent thoughts some- 
times failed to find perfect expression. As I was 
bidding him good-bye at his hospitable door, his 
daughter, who proposed to go with me to the rail- 
road station, urged him to accompany us. " No," said 
he, " no, my dear, my good friend whose name I can- 
not recall, has had quite enough of me to-day ; " and 
then turning to me with a smile, as if to apologize 
for the seeming lack of courtesy in his inability to 
recall my name, he said in words and manner like 
his old self, " Strange that the kind Heavens should 
keep us upon earth after they have destroyed our 
connection with things ! " 

The last time I saw him was at the funeral of 
Longfellow on the 26th of March, just a month be- 
fore his own death. He leaned on my arm as we 
walked through the path at Mt. Auburn behind the 
poet's coffin, and as we stood listening to the short 
service at the grave. He hardly seemed to belong to 
our actual life ; he was present but yet remote ; for 
him, too, " The port well worth the cruise was near." 

If there be pathos in the record of these last days, 
there is no drop of bitterness in it. They were the 
peaceful ending of a happy life. "Enoch walked 
with God ; and he was not, for God took him." 

Emerson's fame is secure. The years will sift his 
work, but his true message and service were not for 



68 THE EMERSON CENTENARY 

his own generation alone. It is not tKe founders 
of schools whose influence is the strongest and most 
lasting in the world, but rather that of teachers who 
lift and invigorate the souls of men by sentiment and 
habitual loftiness of view. Men draw strength and 
high resolve to-day, after seventeen centuries, from 
the desultory Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, and 
in long future time men seeking to elevate and lib- 
erate their souls will find help in the words and ex- 
ample in the character of Emerson. 

The Chairman then introduced Colonel Thomas 
Wentworth Higginson. 



ADDRESS OF 

THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON 

When one opens the morning's newspaper on a day 
like this and finds it filled, like all its companion 
journals, with eulogiums upon one man, it is diffi- 
cult not to recall that fine passage in Landor's 
Imaginary Conversations^ where Demosthenes says 
of Athens, " I have seen the day when the most 
august of cities had but one voice within her walls ; 
and when the stranger, on entering them, stopped 
at the silence of the gateway, and said, ' Demos- 
thenes is speaking in the assemblage of the people. ' " 
One controlling voice speaks to us to-day and all 
that we can do is in our humbler individual tones to 



ADDRESS OF T. W. HIGGINSON 59 

respond to it. The point upon which I am to speak, 
as I understand, is the record of Ealph Waldo 
Emerson as a reformer. 

In viewing him thus, we may well recall Father 
Taylor, the famous preacher to sailors in Boston, 
who, when criticised by some fellow Methodists for 
being a friend of Emerson, inasmuch as he was a 
man who, they thought, must surely go to hell, re- 
plied, "It does look so; but I am sure of one thing; 
if Emerson goes to hell it will change the climate 
there and emigration will set that way." ^ The wide- 
spread commemorations of this month show that 
Father Taylor, as usual, was right. They imply that 
Emerson was not merely a technical reformer, but 
stood to the world as a vital influence and repre- 
sented the general attitude of reform. Above all 
thought rises the freedom to think; above all utter- 
ance ranks the liberty to utter. The man who first 
asserted that liberty at a given time, and, in assert- 
ing it, made it attractive and convincing, became 
the leader of his period. It was Emerson who did 
this for us. From the moment that his volume called 
Nature was published in 1836, the thraldom of 
Puritanism was broken and men were summoned to 
follow the Inner Light. William Penn and the 
early Friends had stretched out their hands for this 
attitude, but had never quite reached it, because 
still somewhat fettered by the tradition of Bible 
worship, and by a persecuting clergy of whom Wil- 
^ Conway : Emerson at Home and Abroad, p. QQ. 



60 THE EMERSON CENTENARY 

Ham Penn complained that so far from being good 
Christians, they had yet to learn to be good 
Heathen.^ Yet Emerson described himself, speak- 
ing to his kinsman. Dr. Haskins, as "more of a 
Quaker than anything else.'* Channing did not 
reach this position, though he drew, as his son tes- 
tifies, nearer and nearer to it as he grew older. 
Parker was not absolutely a leader, but rather fol- 
lowed Emerson and popularized him. Emerson, 
and he only, is the more than Luther of these mod- 
ern days. We'see this through a glass darkly to-day, 
but a hundred years hence, it will be held unques- 
tionable. 

I was but a boy of twelve when Emerson's vol- 
ume. Nature^ was published. But I was not too 
young to hear him lecture once at the Cambridge 
Lyceum, and I recall most definitely the impression 
he made on at least one of his youngest hearers. 
The lectures were held in an old building, preceding 
the present Lyceum Hall, and it was the custom of 
the village boys, as is still the habit in small coun- 
try towns, to attend each lecture, take seats very- 
near the front, and within fifteen minutes retire, 
one by one, without much mercy on the lecturer or 
the audience. No doubt I took my full share of this 
form of intellectual experiment — which in Cam- 
bridge has especial force from the fact that we re- 
tired not down the stairs, but by dropping through 
a mysterious hole in the slanting floor among the 
^ No Cross, No Crown, ii. 76. 



ADDRESS OF T. W. HIGGINSON 61 

upper seats ; but I remember very well that on the 
occasion of Mr. Emerson's lecture, I was gradually- 
deserted by my fellows and sat through the lecture 
alone. Being reproached afterwards by my play- 
mates for this want of fidelity to their customs, I 
could only plead that "I liked to hear that man;" 
and when asked if I understood what he said, I 
honestly replied "No." It now seems to me that 
not one of his grown-up hearers could have paid 
him a greater compliment. What had reached me 
was the personality of the man. Long after this, 
when I read in Lowell's words, "We do not go to 
hear what Emerson says, so much as to hear Emer- 
son," I felt that this was just what I had done as a 
child. 

It was in college that I read his books and reread 
them, but only came gradually to recognize him as 
being what he was, the most resolute reformer, not 
excepting Garrison, whom our nation had produced. 
This conviction took definite form, perhaps, at the 
first meeting of the Free Keligious Association in 
1868, when he came last among the speakers and 
selected for praise the last but one, who had dis- 
tinctly objected to the word "Christian" as being 
a limitation. Mr. Emerson following, said, "I have 
listened with great pleasure to the lessons we have 
heard. To many, to those last spoken, I have found 
so much in common with my own thought that I 
have little left to say." The form of the phrase is 
evidently not given with precise accuracy, but I fol- 



>>^ 



62 THE EMERSON CENTENARY 

low the printed report. He said later in his speech, 
"The child, the young student finds scope in his 
mathematics and chemistry or natural history, be- 
cause he finds a truth larger than he is ; finds him- 
seK continually instructed. But in churches, every 
healthy and thoughtful mind finds itself in some- 
thing less; it is checked, cribbed, confined." No- 
thing: said was on the whole so trenchant as this. 
The Rev. Richard Cecil said in England, about 
1777, that "If one good upright man should deny 
Christianity, he would do the faith of England more 
harm than all the sneers of Voltaire or all the senti- 
mentalism of Rousseau." In the sense in which Cecil 
used the words, Emerson was that man. But these 
words were spoken more than a century ago, at a 
time of sectarian narrowness which it is now hard 
to recall; and the very terms "faith" and "Chris- 
tianity" are now habitually used in a far wider 
sense. To Mr. Cecil, Emerson would have seemed 
anti-Christian ; but now a chorus of those who call 
themselves Christians speaks his praise. We have 
the striking testimony of the Rev. Dr. Haskins, his 
near kinsman, that Mr. Emerson preferred even to 
speak of the Deity as "It," and nothing more illus- 
trates the power of his essentially reverential tone 
of mind than that this same kinsman, an Episcopal 
clergyman of unimpeached standing, was so im- 
pressed by what Emerson said that he himself went 
on to vindicate this pronoun "It" as being, in it- 
self, not meaningless or even irreverent, but rather 



ADDRESS OF T. W. HIGGINSON 63 

a good selection of words, as Mr. Emerson used it, 
standing simply for God's omnipresence.^ We know 
also that while Emerson found formal prayer at 
stated intervals impossible to him, yet he said, "As 
well may the child live without its mother's milk 
as the soul without prayer;" while he also said, 
"Do not speak of God much. After a very little 
conversation on the Highest Nature, thoughts de- 
sert us and we run into formalism ! ! " - He never 
recognized the leadership of Jesus Christ as that 
of an absolutely infallible guide ; yet to show that 
he guarded against overstatement on this ground 
also, we have the remarkable passage, preserved 
by Miss E. P. Peabody from the original manu- 
script of his Divinity Hall address, — a passage 
left out for want of time only, and warning his 
hearers against making even truth a fanaticism: 
"Too soon we shall have the puppyism of a preten- 
sion of looking down on the head of all human cul- 
ture; setting up against Jesus Christ every little 
seK magnified." ^ 

Attempts have always been made to disparage 
Emerson, on the ground that he was not, even in 
reform, a system-maker, but was fragmentary. This 
trait seems to me more and more to have been one 
of his highest titles to immortality. System-makers 
are short-lived ; each makes his single contribution, 

^ Haskins's Emerson, p. 130. 

2 E. W. Emerson in Prophets of Liberalism, p. 49. 

^ Peabody, Reminiscences of Dr. Channing, p. 373. 



64 THE EMERSON CENTENARY 

and the world passes on. They are finger-posts in 
history; but the man who dares to be himself is not 
the finger-post, but the runner. Few now read Aris- 
totle ; but Seneca, Epictetus, Marcus Antoninus yield 
us new translations and editions every year. We 
have them for manuals and give them to our chil- 
dren. What the system of each may be is quite 
secondary — each ojffers us a series of thoughts, 
detached or otherwise; and each of these thoughts 
may turn out great enough to mould a life. Such 
are the thoughts we get from Emerson. We may 
say of his works what Renan said so finely of Mar- 
cus Antoninus, "His works will never grow anti- 
quated, because they offer no dogma." 

Let us all be Platos and Newtons, if you please; 
or, if you prefer. Homers and Shakespeares ; let 
our school committees hunt them up in abundance, 
if possible, in every school district; yet let us not 
lose faith in the greatness of the spontaneous or 
fragmentary life ; that is, the life which becomes at 
its highest moments a source of vital influence. 
Open your Emerson anywhere and you are presently 
touched by the vivid power of a phrase, a sentence ; 
or perhaps — in his earlier addresses especially — 
by the cadence of some fine paragraph. Read, for 
instance, that description of the boyish student to 
be found in his address at Dartmouth College 
(1838): — 

" In solitude, in a remote village, the ardent youth 
loiters and mourns. With inflamed eye, in his sleep- 



ADDRESS OF T. W. HIGGINSON 65 

ing wilderness, he has read the story of the Emperor 
Charles the Fifth, until his fancy has brought home 
to the surrounding woods the faint roar of cannon- 
ades in the Milanese, and marches in Germany. He 
is curious concerning that man's day. What filled 
it? the crowded orders, the stern decisions, the for- 
eign despatches, the Castilian etiquette? The soul 
answers — Behold his day here ! In the sighing of 
these woods, in the quiet of these gray fields, in the 
cool breeze that sings out of these northern mount- 
ains; in the workmen, the boys, the maidens you 
meet, — in the hopes of the morning, the ennui of 
noon, and sauntering of the afternoon; in the dis- 
quieting comparisons; in the regrets at want of 
vigor; in the great idea and the puny execution; 
— behold Charles the Fifth's day; another, yet the 
same; behold Chatham's, Hampden's, Bayard's, 
Alfred's, Scipio's, Pericles's day, — day of all that 
are born of women. The difference of circumstance 
is merely costume. ... Be lord of a day, through 
wisdom and justice, and you can put up your history 
books."! 

Fifty years ago there must have been more than 
a thousand men and women in America and in Eng- 
land who could look back on that passage, as I did, 
and say of it, "At any rate, it was the making of 
me." A hundred thousand others since then may 
have, perhaps, looked back and said of those first 
thousand converts, "It was they who made us." You 
^ Nature^ Addresses and Lectures, pp. 157-159. 



66 THE EMERSON CENTENARY 

might as well question the creative power of pas- 
sages in the Book of Psalms. 

I began with a picture of Emerson as he showed 
himself to an essentially childish mind. Let me 
close with a glimpse of the scene when he was 
brought, for the first time, before a thousand half- 
childish minds, gathered beneath the solemn moss- 
hung forests of South Carolina, early in the Civil 
War. It was the first regiment of freed slaves mus- 
tered into the service of the Union ; and they stood, 
with that perfect stillness of which they were ca- 
pable, while their white surgeon, Dr. Seth Kogers, 
of Worcester, a man who possessed their confidence 
in all ways, read before them at their Sunday ser- 
vice, by his own wish, the whole of Emerson's 
" Boston Hymn." When he came to the lines — 

" Pay ransom to the owner 

And fill his cup to the brim. 
Who is the owner ? The slave is owner, 
And ever was. Pay him ! " — 

I watched their faces as he read. There was no look 
of wild excitement, no air of aroused and selfish 
desire, but a serene religious expression, a look of 
absolute security, as if the Almighty had at last 
heard their prayers and this far-off poet was his 
messenger. 

The Chairman then introduced Professor William 
James. 



ADDKESS OF WILLIAM JAMES 67 



ADDRESS OF WILLIAM JAMES 

The pathos of death is this, that when the days of 
one's life are ended, those days that were so crowded 
with business and felt so heavy in their passing, 
what remains of one in memory should usually be so 
slight a thing. The phantom of an attitude, the 
echo of a certain mode of thought, a few pages of 
print, some invention, or some victory we gained in a 
brief critical hour, are all that can survive the best 
of us. It is as if the whole of a man's significance 
had now shrunk into the phantom of an attitude, 
into a mere musical note or phrase, suggestive of his 
singularity — happy are those whose singularity 
gives a note so clear as to be victorious over the inev- 
itable pity of such a diminution and abridgment. 

An ideal wraith like this, of Emerson's singular- 
ity, hovers over all Concord to-day, taking in the 
minds of those of you who were his neighbors and 
intimates a somewhat fuller shape, remaining more 
abstract in the younger generation, but bringing 
home to all of us the notion of a spirit indescribably 
precious. The form that so lately moved upon these 
streets and country roads, or awaited in these fields 
and woods the beloved Muse's visits, is now dust ; 
but the soul's note, the spiritual voice, rises strong 
and clear above the uproar of the times, and seems 
securely destined to exert an ennobling influence over 
future generations. 



68 THE EMERSON CENTENARY 

What gave a flavor so matchless to Emerson's 
individuality was, even more than his rich mental 
gifts, their combination. Rarely has a man so known 
the limits of his genius or so unfailingly kept within 
them. " Stand by your order,'' he used to say to youth- 
ful students ; and perhaps the paramount impression 
one gets of his life is of his loyalty to his own 
type and mission. The type was that of what he 
liked to call the scholar, the perceiver of pure truth, 
and the mission was that of the reporter in worthy 
form of each perception. The day is good, he said, 
in which we have the most perceptions. There are 
times when the cawing of a crow, a weed, a snow- 
flake, or a farmer planting in his field, become sym- 
bols to the intellect of truths equal to those which 
the most majestic phenomena can open. Let me 
mind my own charge, then, walk alone, consult the 
sky, the field and forest, sedulously waiting every 
morning for the news concerning the structure of 
the universe which the good Spirit will give me. 

This was the first half of Emerson, but only half ; 
for his genius was insatiate for expression, and his 
truth had to be clad in the right verbal garment. 
The form of the garment was so vital with Emer- 
son that it is impossible to separate it from the mat- 
ter. They form a chemical combination, — thoughts 
which would be trivial expressed otherwise are 
important through the nouns and verbs to which 
he married them. The style is the man, it has been 
said : the man Emerson's mission culminated in his 



ADDRESS OF WILLIAM JAMES 69 

style, and if we must define him in one word, we 
have to call him Artist. He was an artist whose 
medium was verbal and who wrought in spiritual 
material. 

This duty of spiritual seeing and reporting deter- 
mined the whole tenor of his life. It was to shield 
it from invasion and distraction that he dwelt in the 
country, and that he consistently declined to entan- 
gle himself with associations or to encumber himself 
with functions which, however he might believe in 
them, he felt were duties for other men and not for 
him. Even the care of his garden, " with its stoop- 
ings and fingerings in a few yards of space," he 
found " narrowing and poisoning," and took to long 
free walks and saunterings instead, without apology. 
" Causes " innumerable sought to enlist him as their 
"worker" — all got his smile and word of sympa- 
thy, but none entrapped him into service. The strug- 
gle against slavery itself, deeply as it appealed to 
him, found him firm : " God must govern his own 
world, and knows his way out of this pit without 
my desertion of my post, which has none to guard it 
but me. I have quite other slaves to face than those 
Negroes, to wit, imprisoned thoughts far back in the 
brain of man, and which have no watchman or lover 
or defender but me." This in reply to the possible 
questions of his conscience. To hot-blooded moral- 
ists with more objective ideas of duty, such a fidel- 
ity to the limits of his genius must often have made 
him seem provokingly remote and unavailable ; but 



70 THE EMERSON CENTENARY 

we who can see things in more liberal perspective 
must unqualifiedly approve the results. The fault- 
less tact with which he kept his safe limits while he 
80 dauntlessly asserted himself within them is an 
example fitted to give heart to other theorists and 
artists the world over. 

The insight and creed from which Emerson's life 
followed can be best summed up in his own verse : — 

" So nigh is grandeur to our dust, 
So near is God to man ! " 

Through the individual fact there ever shone for 
him the effulgence of the Universal Reason. The 
great Cosmic Intellect terminates and houses itself 
in mortal men and passing hours. Each of us is an 
angle of its eternal vision, and the only way to be 
true to our Maker is to be loyal to ourselves. " O 
rich and various Man ! " he cries, " thou palace of 
sight and sound, carrying in thy senses the morning 
and the night and the unfathomable galaxy ; in thy 
brain the geometry of the city of God ; in thy heart 
the bower of love and the realms of right and 
wrong." 

If the individual open thus directly into the Ab- 
solute, it follows that there is something in each and 
all of us, even the lowliest, that ought not to consent 
to borrowing traditions and living at second hand. 
" If John was perfect, why are you and I alive ? " 
writes Emerson. " As long as any man exists there 
is some need of him ; let him fight for his own." 



ADDRESS OF WILLIAM JAMES 71 

This faith that in a life at first hand there is some- 
thing sacred is perhaps the most characteristic note 
in Emerson's writings. The hottest side of him is 
this non-conformist persuasion, and if his temper 
could ever verge on common irascibility, it would be 
by reason of the passionate character of his feelings 
on this point. The world is still new and untried. In 
seeing freshly, and not in hearing of what others 
saw, shall a man find what truth is. " Each one of 
us can bask in the great morning which rises out of 
the Eastern Sea, and be himself one of the children 
of the light." " Trust thyself, every heart vibrates to 
that iron string. There is a time in each man's edu- 
cation when he must arrive at the conviction that 
imitation is suicide ; when he must take himself for 
better or worse as his portion ; and know that though 
the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nour- 
ishing corn can come to him but through his toil be- 
stowed on that plot of ground which it was given 
him to till." 

The matchless eloquence with which Emerson pro- 
claimed the sovereignty of the living individual elec- 
trified and emancipated his generation, and this 
bugle-blast will doubtless be regarded by future critics 
as the soul of his message. The present man is the 
aboriginal reality, the Institution is derivative, and 
the past man is irrelevant and obliterate for present 
issues. " If any one would lay an axe to your tree 
with a text from 1 John, v. 7, or a sentence from 
Saint Paul, say to him," Emerson wrote, " ' My tree 



72 THE EMERSON CENTENARY 

is Ygdrasil, the tree of life.' Let Lim know by your 
security that your conviction is clear and sufficient, 
and, if he were Paul himself, that you also are here 
and with your Creator." " Cleave ever to God," he 
insisted, " against the name of God ; " — and so, in 
spite of the intensely religious character of his total 
thought, when he began his career it seemed to many 
of his brethren in the clerical profession that he was 
little more than an iconoclast and desecrator. 

Emerson's belief that the individual must in rear 
son be adequate to the vocation for which the Spirit 
of the world has called him into being is the source 
of those sublime pages, hearteners and sustainers of 
our youth, in which he urges his hearers to be in- 
corruptibly true to their own private conscience. 
Nothing can harm the man who rests in his appointed 
place and character. Such a man is invulnerable ; he 
balances the universe, balances it as much by keep- 
ing small when he is small as by being great and 
spreading when he is great. " I love and honor Epa- 
minondas," said Emerson, " but I do not wish to be 
Epaminondas. I hold it more just to love the world 
of this hour than the world of his hour. Nor can you, 
if I am true, excite me to the least uneasiness by say- 
ing, ' He acted and thou sittest still.' I see action to 
be good when the need is, and sitting stiU to be also 
good. Epaminondas, if he was the man I take him 
for, would have sat stiU with joy and peace, if his 
lot had been mine. Heaven is large, and affords space 
for all modes of love and fortitude." " The fact that 



ADDRESS OF WILLIAM JAMES 73 

I am here certainly shows me that the Soul has need 
of an organ here, and shall I not assume the post ? " 

The vanity of all super-serviceableness and pretense 
was never more happily set forth than by Emerson 
in the many passages in which he develops this as- 
pect of his philosophy. Character infallibly proclaims 
itself. " Hide your thoughts ! — hide the sun and 
moon. They publish themselves to the universe. 
They will speak through you though you were dumb. 
They will flow out of your actions, your manners and 
your face. . . . Don't say things : What you are 
stands over you the while and thunders so that I can- 
not say what you say to the contrary. . . . What a 
man is engraves itself upon him in letters of light. 
Concealment avails him nothing, boasting nothing. 
There is confession in the glances of our eyes ; in 
our smiles ; in salutations ; and the grasp of hands. 
His sin bedaubs him, mars all his good impression. 
Men know not why they do not trust him, but they 
do not trust him. His vice glasses the eye, casts lines 
of mean expression in the cheek, pinches the nose, sets 
the mark of the beast upon the back of the head, and 
writes, O fool ! fool ! on the forehead of a king. If 
you would not be known to do a thing, never do it ; 
a man may play the fool in the drifts of a desert, 
but every grain of sand shall seem to see. — How 
can a man be concealed ? How can he be concealed ? " 

On the other hand, never was a sincere word or a 
sincere thought utterly lost. " Never a magnanimity 
fell to the ground but there is some heart to greet 



74 THE EMERSON CENTENARY 

and accept it unexpectedly. . . . The hero fears not 
that if he withstood the avowal of a just and brave 
act, it will go unwitnessed and unloved. One knows 
it, — himself, — and is pledged by it to sweetness of 
peace and to nobleness of aim, which will prove in 
the end a better proclamation than the relating of 
the incident." 

The same indefeasible right to be exactly what one 
is, provided one only be authentic, spreads itself, in 
Emerson's way of thinking, from persons to things 
and to times and places. No date, no position is 
insignificant, if the life that fills it out be only 
genuine : — 

" In solitude, in a remote village, the ardent youth 
loiters and mourns. With inflamed eye, in this sleep- 
ing wilderness, he has read the story of the Emperor 
Charles the Fifth, until his fancy has brought home 
to the surrounding woods the faint roar of can- 
nonades in the Milanese, and marches in Germany. 
He is curious concerning that man's day. What filled 
it? The crowded orders, the stern decisions, the 
foreign despatches, the Castilian etiquette ? The soul 
answers — Behold his day here ! In the sighing of 
these woods, in the quiet of these gray fields, in the 
cool breeze that sings out of these northern mount- 
ains; in the workmen, the boys, the maidens you 
meet, — in the hopes of the morning, the ennui of 
noon, and sauntering of the afternoon ; in the dis- 
quieting comparisons ; in the regrets at want of vigor ; 
in the great idea and the puny execution ; — behold 



ADDRESS OF WILLIAM JAMES 75 

Charles the Fifth's day ; another, yet the same ; 
behold Chatham's, Hampden's, Bayard's, Alfred's, 
Scipio's, Perieles's day, — day of all that are born of 
women. The difference of circumstance is merely 
costume. I am tasting the self -same life, — its sweet- 
ness, its greatness, its pain, — which I so admire in 
other men. Do not foolishly ask the inscrutable, 
obliterated past what it cannot tell, — the details of 
that nature, of that day, called Byron or Burke ; — 
but ask it of the enveloping Now. ... Be lord of a 
day and you can put up your history books." 

Thus does " the deep to-day which all men scorn" 
receive from Emerson superb revindication. " Other 
world ! there is no other world." All God's life opens 
into the individual particular, and here and now, 
or nowhere, is reality. "The present hour is the 
decisive hour, and every day is doomsday." 

Such a conviction that Divinity is everywhere may 
easily make of. one an optimist of the sentimental 
type that refuses to speak ill of anything. Emerson's 
drastic perception of differences kept him at the 
opposite pole from this weakness. After you have 
seen men a few times, he could say, you find most 
of them as alike as their barns and pantries, and 
soon as musty and as dreary. Never was such a fas- 
tidious lover of significance and distinction, and 
never an eye so keen for their discovery. His opti- 
mism had nothing in common with that indiscriminate 
hurrahing for the Universe with which Walt Whit- 
man has made us familiar. For Emerson, the indi- 



76 THE EMERSON CENTENARY 

vidual fact and moment were indeed suffused with 
absolute radiance, but it was upon a condition that 
saved the situation — they must be worthy specimens, 
— sincere, authentic, archetypal; they must have 
made connection with what he calls the Moral Sen- 
timent, they must in some way act as symbolic 
mouthpieces of the Universe's meaning. To know 
just which thing does act in this way, and which 
thing fails to make the true connection, is the secret 
(somewhat incommunicable, it must be confessed) of 
seership, and doubtless we must not expect of the 
seer too rigorous a consistency. Emerson himself was 
a real seer. He could perceive the full squalor of 
the individual fact, but he could also see the trans- 
figuration. He might easily have found himself say- 
ing of some present-day agitator against our Philip- 
pine conquest what he said of this or that reformer 
of his own time. He might have called him, as a 
private person, a tedious bore and canter. But he 
would infallibly have added what he then added: 
*' It is strange and horrible to say this, for I feel that 
under him and his partiality and exclusiveness is 
the earth and the sea, and all that in them is, and 
the axis round which the Universe revolves passes 
through his body where he stands." 

Be it how it may, then, this is Emerson's revela- 
tion : — The point of any pen can be an epitome of 
reality ; the commonest person's act, if genuinely 
actuated, can lay hold on eternity. This vision is the 
head-spring of all his outpourings ; and it is for this 



ADDRESS OF WILLIAM JAMES 77 

truth, given to no previous literary artist to express 
in sucli penetratingly persuasive tones, that poster- 
ity will reckon him a prophet, and, perhaps neglect- 
ing other pages, piously turn to those that convey 
this message. His life was one long conversation 
with the invisible divine, expressing itself through 
individuals and particulars : — "So nigh is grandeur 
to our dust, so near is God to man ! " 

I spoke of how shrunken the wraith, how thin the 
echo, of men is after they are departed. Emerson's 
wraith comes to me now as if it were but the very 
voice of this victorious argument. His words to this 
effect are certain to be quoted and extracted more 
and more as time goes on, and to take their place 
among the Scriptures of humanity. " 'Gainst death 
and all oblivious enmity shall you pace forth," be- 
loved Master. As long as our English language 
lasts, men's hearts will be cheered and their souls 
strengthened and liberated by the noble and musical 
pages with which you have enriched it. 

The Chairman then said : — 

May I say on your behalf, citizens of Concord, 
that we greet with warm and peculiar affection our 
elder brother, George Frisbie Hoar. 



78 THE EMERSON CENTENARY 

ADDRESS OF 

GEORGE FRISBIE HOAR 

f 

I AM proud and happy that I am counted among the 
children of Concord on this anniversary. There are 
many things we are all thinking that we cannot find 
time to say to-day. There are some things we are 
all thinking that Mr. Emerson would not like to 
have us say. His modest and discreet spirit would 
have found something of exaggeration in it, even 
coming from his neighbors and townsmen. 

We are thinking, all of us, of that lovely and 
delightful personal quality, pure and sweet as that 
of an archangel. We are full of the love which every 
one of us who knew him felt for him, from the time 
he first took up his abode here in his sylvan home. 
But the town has had other citizens of that quality. 
That town is poor that has not had them. We are 
tempted to compare our philosopher and poet with 
other great men, with other thinkers, and writers, 
and poets. Some of us think Emerson the first 
American by the same title by which Shakespeare is 
the first Englishman. Some of us think of him as 
the only writer since Bacon, in whose essays a 
thought quoted from Bacon's essays seems to be in 
its natural place, — the setting quite as costly as the 
jewel. But I do not think he would have liked such 
comparisons. At any rate, if they are to be made, 
let them be made by men without the bias of a per- 
sonal affection. 



ADDRESS OF GEORGE FRISBIE HOAR 79 

Yet our celebration would be cold indeed, were we 
to leave out of it the human feeling, — the feeling of 
pride and love, — in which we have a right to indulge 
as his townsmen and his countrymen. 

When the young philosopher, in his first produc- 
tion which might be called public, — his Bowdoin 
Prize Essay, in 1820, — disclosed his aspiration and 
his ideal of excellence, he prefaced it with these 
lines. He was then seventeen years old. 

" Guide my way 
Through fair Lyceum's walk, the green retreats 
Of Academus, and the thymy vale 
Where, oft enchanted with Socratic sounds, 
Ilissus pure devolved his tuneful stream 
In gentler murmurs. From the blooming store 
Of these auspicious fields, may I unblamed 
Transplant some living blossoms to adorn 
My native clime." 

Surely that aspiration was accomplished. Ah, 
sweetest of Evangelists! Here in these fields of 
ours stood your feet when you uttered your message 
to mankind. You walked by our river and our ponds, 
like Lycidas, the very genius of the shore. You 
transplanted here, unblamed, the living blossoms of 
the groves of Academe. You waked again the echoes 
of the voice of Plato, mingled with Ilissus' tuneful 
murmurs, in our woods and fields and by our Indian 
stream. 

I do not undertake to speak of Mr. Emerson's 
service to the youth of his country, as a guide to 



80 THE EMERSON CENTENARY 

the best literature, or as a counsellor and inspirer to 
that noble and brave behavior of which he was, 
himself, so admirable an example. I will not speak 
of him as a critic, to whose almost infallible touch- 
stone every man brought his metal to see if it were 
gold. I will not undertake to speak of him as a 
poet, or as an orator, rising, on fit occasion, to the 
loftiest eloquence. 

I have time to speak of him in but one aspect. 
That is, the contribution he made to the knowledge 
by mankind of spiritual laws. 

I think he had the farthest and clearest spiritual 
discernment of any man who has lived in modern 
times. His vision was not only keen and far-sighted, 
but he was singularly free from the things that dis- 
tort or disturb. There was no local attraction, or 
temptation, or heat, or blur. So we may take him 
as the best witness we know of to the spiritual facts 
which are all around us and close to us, but yet so 
many of which we cannot know, or know but imper- 
fectly, by any seeing or hearing of our own. What 
we see, he saw more clearly. What we hear, he heard 
more distinctly. And always he sees a face we can- 
not see, and hears a voice we cannot hear. Now, to 
what does this witness, the best witness we can find 
so far, certify ? Whether any human intelligence be 
absolutely trustworthy, or any human judgment be 
absolutely sure, in its report of such things, or in 
determining their value and quality, we need not stop 
to inquire. This is, in our opinion, the best we have 



ADDRESS OF GEORGE FRISBIE HOAR 81 

at command. What are the things which this man 
of farthest and profoundest vision has to report? 
What is the estimate of them by the judgment the 
most accurate in its poise ? What do they weigh by 
these balances in which there is no dust ? 

I do not mean only that he saw what no other man 
can see. I mean, too, what other men see dimly and 
doubtfully, but are the more certain of because he 
saw it too. Persons on the deck see a dim object or 
a cloud of smoke in the horizon. Some conjecture 
one thing, and some another. Then comes the pilot 
with his far sight and his trained eye, and tells you 
that it is a steamer, or a ship. He knows the line to 
which she belongs, and the name of the vessel. He 
only, it may be, confirms what some of the rest have 
said. But what other men guessed, he knew. 

Every man who is seeking a spiritual life finds in 
Emerson his own faith, if he have faith, as the 
Christian sects find theirs in the Saviour. Now, what 
are the things in which our confidence is strengthened 
and deepened by the fact that he tells us they are 
true ? Some of them — and we may thank God for 
it — we may see also for ourselves. Some of them he 
reveals to us and makes clear to us. But we can take 
the courage that they give us from the fact that the 
clearest eyes, and the best intelligence, and the most 
dispassionate judgment that has appeared among men 
for many a day adds to the imperfect evidence of our 
intelligence, the more perfect evidence of his. I 
cannot, of course, in a few minutes, enumerate all 



82 THE EMERSON CENTENARY 

the things he has reported to us. It would take a 
long, and careful, and profound study to comprehend 
them myself. 

He has taught us the virtue of completeness, and 
courage, and sincerity of utterance. In dealing with 
the things that pertain to the soul he utters no half- 
truths, no pious frauds. He gives us no milk for 
babes. The purpose of Emerson, like that of Milton, 
is to justify the ways of God to man, and they do 
not need to be clothed in a veil. God is not to be 
seen, as Moses saw him, from behind. 

He affirms that inspiration, and the [process of 
revelation, did not end with the Apostles and the 
Scriptures. It is going on to-day, and all the time, 
to him that hath ears to hear. The bush is burning 
still. 

The spiritual message comes to each man for him- 
self, which he can trust and which he must act upon. 
" Trust thyself ! Every nerve vibrates to that iron 
string." The universe is for the building up of indi- 
vidual character. Each soul is to be a star and dwell 
apart. Men should greet each other every morning 
as coming from far countries — like the Gods, who 
sit apart, and talk from peak to peak all around 
Olympus. 

Mr. Emerson said of his own style that his works 
were made up of infinitely repellent particles. This 
is in a sense true of humanity — as he thought it 
should be. But he has reaffirmed for us, and taught 
us anew the value of the human affections, and 



ADDRESS OF GEORGE FRISBIE HOAR 83 

to prize the great virtues to which our race has 
attained thus far. He was a royal and noble lover. 
He loved wife, and children, and home, and neigh- 
bor, and friend, and town, and country. He loved 
liberty, and justice, and hope, and courage. His 
picture of the New England Town, for which Con- 
cord sat ; his Boston Hymn ; his Fortune of the Re- 
public, are the high-water mark which the love of 
country, and of birthplace, and of town had reached 
at that time. 

Has any man spoken to us like him of the virtue 
of a good hope, since the Apostle placed it forever 
in the centre of the mighty group ? He saw that 
crime and sin led all souls to the good. The cosmic 
results will be the same whatever the daily events 
may be. 

He was eminently a reconciler. His larger orbit 
enclosed all lesser orbits, and even all divergent lines. 

One thing he saw which mankind have not seen. 
That is, that forever the slave is owner, and forever 
the victim is victor. 

So, when Freedom, Virtue, Religion, Justice, Love, 
Patriotism, call their witnesses his name will be the 
first of our time to be called. So far as mortal testi- 
mony can prove it, they can rest the case with him. 

He has made the best statement in all secular 
literature of the doctrine of immortality. He shows 
us that the world and the human soul are not only 
unreasonable, but inexplicable, without it. Yet he 
makes no absolute affirmation, except that we shall 



84 THE EMERSON CENTENARY 

be immortal if that be best. Whether we shall know 
each other again is a Sunday-school question. He 
will not spend his time about it. Perhaps, as he says 
of Carlyle, this nimble and active spirit does not care 
to beat itself against walls. But he is not, like Carlyle, 
a destroyer or a scorner. He worships no demon of 
mere force. If he does not know what we long to 
know of another world, he pays due homage to the 
loving and wise Spirit that sitteth as Sovereign on 
the throne of this. Kather he believes that the world 
is but one world, and that the Sovereign who reigns 
over it — never to be dethroned — knows very well 
that every road leads to the gates of His Kingdom. 
He sees no God of force or of disdain looking down 
on mankind as on a race of grovelling swine or 
chattering apes. For myself, I never read what 
Emerson says about Immortality, or think of him 
as thinking about it, without summing it all up in 
Addison's noble line, — 

" The Soul, secure in her existence, smiles." 

When Emerson first uttered his grave and cheerful 
voice, there still echoed in the ear of mankind the 
cry of disdain inspired by the diseased brain of 
Carlyle, when he imagined the serene and silent stars 
looking down from their eternal solitudes on the 
varied occupations of men. " What thinks Bootes of 
them as he leads his hunting-dogs across the zenith 
in their leash of sidereal fire ? " What thinks Bootes 
of them ? Bootes is but a few specks of shining dust, 



ADDRESS OF GEORGE FRISBIE HOAR 85 

glistening witli putrescent light, save as he is clothed 
with beauty and with glory in the conscious soul of 
man. The only thing in the world, under Him who 
made it, that can ever be truly an object of reverence 
is a human soul subjecting itself, of its own volition, 
to a law higher than its own desire. The answer to 
the seer of the old world came from the seer of the 
new; — 

" So nigh is grandeur to our dust, 
So near is God to man, 
When Duty whispers low, Thou must,' 
The youth replies, ' I can.' " 

Nothing could be more unbecoming than to speak 
irreverently of Carlyle while we are doing homage to 
Emerson. Emerson stood loyally by his friends, by 
that friend most loyally of all. Among Carlyle's 
chief titles to remembrance by posterity will be 
Emerson's certificate. 

Still, Emerson, though his lover and admirer, 
admits that Carlyle reminds him of a sick giant. 
Carlyle is a hater of evil. He stands for honesty 
and righteousness. He finds them hardly anywhere, 
and finds them least of all in the men who are 
most eager in trying to attain unto them. Until 
honesty and righteousness come to the throne — 
which Carlyle does not expect to happen in his time 
— he proposes to maintain and to obey an ad inte- 
rim Sovereign, who is nothing but a poor and com- 
monplace tyrant. 

Jowett well said of him that he was a man with- 



86 THE EMERSON CENTENARY 

out admiration of any active goodness ; he expressed 
his own personal fancies in the likeness of intellec- 
tual truths, and that if he, himself, were engaged in 
any work more than usually good, Carlyle would be 
the first person to utter a powerful sneer, and if he 
were seeking to know the truth, Carlyle would ridi- 
cule the notion of a homunculus discovering the 
truth. 

Wordsworth said truly of Carlyle that he defied 
all sympathy. And he said truly of the Carlyle tem- 
per: — 

«* That pride, 
How e'er disguised in its own majesty, 
Is littleness ; that he who feels contempt 
For any living thing hath faculties 
That he has never used, that thought with him, 
Is in its infancy." 

He seemed to despise every good man. He was 
essentially a scorner, and the lash of his scorn fell 
upon good men ; and his homage, which he rarely 
gave, was given, in general, to bad men. However 
we may be dazzled by Carlyle, our fixed star will be 
shining in the sky when this meteor is gone. If we 
may trust our seer when he tells us that evil is tem- 
porary and perishable, and that 

" What is excellent, 
As God lives, is permanent," 

then the function of the destroyer of evil is perish- 
able and temporary also. 

Mr. Emerson's philosophy had no Stoicism in it. 



ADDRESS OF GEORGE FRISBIE HOAR 87 

If it brought him ampler compensations than were 
vouchsafed to common men, grief also filled to its 
depths a larger heart, and touched with its agony- 
nerves more finely sensitive than those of common 
men. Who has uttered, like him, in that immortal 
"Threnody,'^ the voice of parental sorrow? What 
more loving heart ever mourned the loss of a brother's 
love than that which could not be unlocked because 
the key had gone with Charles and Edward ? I re- 
member, as if it were yesterday, that winter morning 
in my early youth, when the messenger came to my 
father's door before sunrise, bearing his written mes- 
sage to one of the household, " Everything wakes 
this morning, except my darling boy." The noblest 
emotions of the soul are nobler to us that they have 
moved him. 

I have spoken very imperfectly of a part only of 
the messages Emerson brought to us. Now, it is not 
enough for our purpose that the intellect should see 
these things. Men do not like skeletons or anatomies. 
And they do not like cold. These things must come 
to us, if they are to be living truths for us, clothed 
and apparelled in regal splendor; adorned and 
wreathed with flowers and branches ; made sweet and 
tender by the graces of poetry ; made musical with 
rhythm and verse. They must be spoken by eloquent 
lips, and the soul must be opened to receive them by 
the glance of the eye, and the tone of the voice, and 
the flush of the cheek, of the prophet who utters them. 

We who are the survivors of that generation, and 



88 THE EMERSON CENTENARY 

who dwelt in the town of his home, enjoyed that 
privilege also. I do not know how others may feel. 
But I would not be without that sweet and tender 
memory of the voice whose words yet linger in my 
ear, " nestling," as Lowell says, " in the ear, because 
of their music, and in the heart, because of their 
meaning," to have heard Demosthenes speak from 
the Bema, or Plato in the Academy. 

To cite the tributes of eminent authorities to the 
great place of Mr. Emerson in literature, and his 
trustworthiness as an intellectual and spiritual guide, 
would occupy not only the day but the year. We 
cannot undertake to do that. But we ought to be 
certain that we are not induced by our love for our 
delightful friend and townsman to confound our own 
narrow field of vision with that of all mankind — 
especially with that of posterity. Yet that must be 
a fixed star of the first magnitude, of whom observ- 
ers, whose stations are apart by the distance of the 
whole heavens, concur in so reporting. When the 
Jew, and the Catholic, and the Unitarian, and the 
Anglican, and the Calvinist, and the Sceptic ; when 
the Russian, and the German, and the Scotsman, 
concur with his own countrymen in their estimate 
of a religious teacher, we may fairly believe that 
we have got the verdict not of the year or of the 
generation only, but of the centuries. 

I received the other day a letter from an accom- 
plished Jew containing a paper he had written upon 
Emerson. In it he says, " Emerson's hold on the 



ADDRESS OF GEORGE FRISBIE HOAR 89 

minds and thoughts of men is truly remarkable. The 
circle of his influence grows continually wider and 
wider. He appeals to the most various and diverse 
natures. The greatest and the humblest unite in 
paying him homage. He fascinates and inspires the 
hearts and souls of all. The men and women of two 
continents come to his writings with the feeling that 
a new world has been discovered, and a new era 
opened in their lives. They peruse his works with a 
delight and an avidity unaroused and unsatisfied by 
any other author, ancient or modern. The sanest, 
the soberest, the most 'practical' lawyers, doctors, 
statesmen, philosophers, business men — those are 
among the unnumbered hosts of those throughout 
the world who confess themselves the eager, devoted 
students and admirers of the inspiring Emerson. 
His words are on every tongue. His sentences illu- 
mine the pages and adorn the speeches of the great- 
est writers and orators." 

About the time I got his letter, I heard from 
Bishop Spaulding, one of the most eminent Catholic 
prelates in this country, who has lately earned public 
gratitude by an important service to public order, 
that Emerson was a favorite author of his also. This 
is his letter. It is written with some reserve, as 
would be expected from one to whom the^Church is 
the final authority on all such questions. I am told 
that Bishop Spaulding is called by the men of his 
own faith "the Catholic Emerson," and that they 
deem it a title of high honor. 



90 THE EMERSON CENTENARY 

St. Mary's Cathedral, 
Peoria, III., April 14, 1903. 

My dear Senator Hoar: — I send you this 
brief word on Emerson. 

Emerson is the keenest, the most receptive, the 
most thoughtful mind we have had; and whatever 
his limitations, his failures to get at the profoundest 
and therefore the most interesting truth, he is, and 
probably will continue to be for a long time, the 
most vital force in American literature. His influ- 
ence [wiR outlast that of Carlyle and Ruskin. His 
sanity, his modesty, his kindliness are greater ; he is 
more hopeful and consequently more helpful than 
they. He himself says we judge of a man's wisdom 
by his hopefulness ; and so we may give him a place 
among the world's wise men. 

Very sincerely yours, 
(Signed) I. L. Spaulding. 

Constantine Pobedonostzeff, since the death of 
Alexander H., has been the power behind the throne 
in Eussia. At the first meeting of Alexander HI. 
with his councillors, he told the Emperor that all 
liberal measures and all constitutions were a de- 
lusion; that no constitution was fitted to Eussia 
except the will of an autocrat, directed by his own 
sense of responsibility to the Almighty. He holds 
that not only the political conduct, but the religious 
faith of the people must be ordered from the throne. 
Six words — " Obey or die ; believe or die " — are 



ADDRESS OF GEORGE FRISBIE HOAR 91 

all the constitution, statute, or bill of rights for 
an empire that holds one sixth of the people of the 
globe. I suppose his single will, influencing that of 
the Emperor, and compelling submission from the 
whole people, has been, for nearly a quarter of a 
century, the most powerful single will on the face of 
the earth. Yet his favorite author is Emerson. He 
has enriched Russian literature by several transla- 
tions. The first book he translated was Thomas a 
Kempis's Imitation of Christy and the next was 
Emerson's " Works and Days." 

A little time ago, at my request, he sent for the 
Concord Library a volume of his translation into 
Russian, with an autograph letter and his own por- 
trait. I was told by our representative at St. Peters- 
burg that he was much delighted by my request 
which led him to send them. This is the letter with 
which he accompanied the book : — 

Sir : — It is true that having been from my youth 
a constant reader and admirer of Ralph Waldo Emer- 
son, I one day undertook the translation of one of 
his essays, " Works and Days," taken from the book, 
Society and Solitude. The work had for me a par- 
ticular interest, since it is not easy to express in a 
foreign language the original style of the author. 
The work, published in 1874, was reprinted in a col- 
lection of my essays which appeared in 1896, in Mos- 
cow. 

The Hon. Andrew White, whose stay at St. Peters- 



92 THE EMERSON CENTENARY 

burg, unhappily too short, has left with me the most 
agreeable memories, probably had this work in view 
when he mentioned my fondness for Emerson in an 
article in the Century Magazine, 

If my book should answer the idea of Senator 
Hoar, I desire to send it to you. Monsieur, with the 
request that you transmit it to the Library at Con- 
cord with my most sincere compliments. 

Accept, Monsieur, the expression of my most re- 
spectful regards, 

(signed) Const. Pobedonostzeff. 

The 17th of May, 1898, Petersburg. 
To Monsieur Herbert Pierce. 

In 1833, three years before he wrote Nature^ Mrs. 
Ripley said of him, " We regard him still, more than 
ever, as the apostle of the Eternal Reason." 

When Dean Stanley was in this country he took 
special pains to inform himself of the history and 
present condition of our religious denominations. 
The result of his observation was, that whatever 
might be the sect or creed of the clergymen, they 
all preached Emerson. 

It were a sorry story for humanity if these eternal 
verities had been uttered by but one voice, or had 
waited from the beginning for any one voice to utter 
them. They were revealed to humanity in the morn- 
ing of creation. The revelation will continue until 
time shall be no more. What is best in humanity 
answered in the beginning, and will answer to the 



ADDRESS OF GEORGE FRISBIE HOAR 93 

end. The lesson is that the common virtues, the com- 
mon hopes, the common loves, the common faiths of 
mankind are the foundations on which the Universe 
is builded and are the things that shall endure. There 
is a diversity of gifts, but the same spirit. There 
is a difference of language, but the same message. 
Emerson says, "he is base — that is the one base thing 
of the universe — to receive benefits, and render 
none." " JVbhlesse oblige,''^ says the chivalrous pro- 
verb of France. " To whom much is given, of him 
much shall be required," say the Hebrew Scriptures. 
Emerson tells us that beauty, love, and truth are 
one. He is only another witness that faith, and 
hope, and love are the pillars on which all things 
rest, and that they abide. Their identity the Church 
has striven for ages to express in the great doctrine 
of the Trinity. Emerson also tells us that they are 
one with duty and with joy. What is that but to 
say with the Assembly's catechism that the chief end 
of man is to " glorify God and to enjoy him forever " ? 
Thank God if it be true that these are the eternal 
commonplaces, and that the humblest individual soul 
as well as the greatest, by virtue of its birthright as 
a child of the Infinite Soul, is able to comprehend 
them and to trust them. 

But above all these, comprehending them all, is 
his perception of a presence that I hardly know how 
to name, and that it sometimes seems he did not like 
to name. I asked a famous preacher what it was 
that he thought Emerson saw more clearly than other 



94 THE EMERSON CENTENARY 

men. He said, "It is the Immanent God." What 
Emerson would have called it if he had given it 
a name, I do not know — God, the Over-Soul, the 
Unknown, the Unity manifesting itself in beauty, in 
power, in love, in joy, in duty, existing everywhere, 
speaking in every age through some prophet of its 
own, — it spoke to our age its high commands 
through the lips of Emerson. 

The exercises closed at forty-five minutes after five 
with the " Seventy-eighth Psalm," sung by the congrega- 
tion to the tune of " St. Martins." 



THE EVENING 



1 



THE EVENING 

The Social Circle met in the evening of May 25, 
1903, at seven o'clock, in the vestry of the First 
Parish. It had been voted at a meeting February 
3, 1903, " that Miss Ellen T. Emerson, Mrs. Wil- 
liam H. Forbes and her children, and the family of 
Edward W. Emerson be invited ... as guests of 
the Circle." Other guests were invited by the Com- 
mittee and by the members individually, and in all 
one hundred and fifty-two were present. 

At half -past seven the company took their seats, 
the guests invited by the vote of the Circle and those 
invited by the Committee sitting at tables upon the 
raised platform at the end of the room, with the 
Chairman of the Committee. 

The tables were decorated with lady's-slipper and 
rhodora. A large portrait of Mr. Emerson, framed 
in branches of pink hawthorn, with a laurel wreath 
at its base, rested against the head table in front of 
the Chairman. Branches of wild cornel bush, wild 
cherry, and pink hawthorn filled the spaces on either 
side. On the walls hung extracts from Mr. Emerson's 
writings framed in pine boughs. 

On the dinner card was the " Concord Hymn," a 
colored print of the rhodora blossom with four lines 



98 THE EMERSON CENTENARY 

from " The Rhodora," and the following tribute to 
the Social Circle written by Mr. Emerson to a friend 
December 17, 1844 : — 

" Much the best society I have ever known is a 
club in Concord called the Social Circle, consisting 
always of twenty-five of our citizens, doctor, lawyer, 
farmer, trader, miller, mechanic, etc., solidest of men, 
who yield the solidest of gossip. Harvard University 
is a wafer compared to the solid land which my friends 
represent." 

The menu was as follows : — 

Little Necks 

Radishes Olives 

Cream of Lettuce 

Toast Sticks 

Turbans of Halibut Lobster Sauce 

Sliced Cucumbers 

FiUet of Beef 

Potato Croquettes Green Peas 

Asparagus, Hollandaise 

Lettuce and Tomato Salad, Mayonnaise 

Frozen Pudding Strawberries 

Ice Cream and Water Ices 

Assorted Cake 

Toasted Crackers 

Roquefort Cheese Cream Cheese 

Coffee 

During the dinner there was music by an orches- 
tra, and then the Chairman, the Hon. John Shep* 
ard Keyes, rose and said : — 



SPEECH OF CAROLINE HAZARD 99 



EEMARKS OF JOHN SHEPARD KEYES 

Ladies and Gentlemen, Friends and Fellow Mem- 
bers of the Social Circle : — To-night is Emerson's, 

THE SEER. 

" Alone on his dim heights of song and dream 
He saw the dawn, and of its solace told. 
We on his brow beheld the luminous gleam 
And listened idly, for the night was cold. 

*' Then clouds shut out the view, and he was gone, 
And though the way is dubious, dark the night, 
And though our dim eyes still await the dawn, 
We saw a face that once beheld the light." 

This is the third time — and the third time never 
fails — that the ladies have attended a meeting of 
the Social Circle. The first occasion was at the Cen- 
tennial of the Circle, the second was on a summer 
evening later, and to-night we have a majority of 
the fair sex with us. I am very glad to be able to 
present to you the President of the foremost women's 
college, the daughter of an especial friend of Emer- 
son — Miss Hazard, of Wellesley College. 



SPEECH OF CAROLINE HAZARD 

Mr. Chairman, and Members of the Social 
Circle : — I am sure it is a great honor to be accounted 
a member of this Social Circle for this one evening, 

LofC.s 



100 THE EMERSON CENTENARY 

an honor which I prize very highly. I must say, 
when your Chairman of the day asked me to come 
here and say a word, I feared that I should be what 
Mr. Emerson would call " an unauthorized talker." 
But I have the authority, not only of the kind invi- 
tation of your Chairman, but what Mr. Emerson 
would recognize as the true authority — the authority 
of the affection and gratitude which I have — which 
all women must have — for the work which Mr. 
Emerson did for women as well as for men. It 
seems to me that that splendid message of the dig- 
nity of the person and of the worth of personality 
which he preached and was the preeminent example 
of — that message which he spoke to all young men 
and young women — comes with an especial force 
to the young women of to-day. When we think 
what New England was one hundred years ago, how 
it was truly a provincial New England, — a New 
England connected with the mother country by 
the closest ties, but still connected only with the 
mother country and not with the great world cur- 
rents, — we also think of what Mr. Emerson did 
in widening that connection, in making the con- 
nection with the whole of German literature, with 
the revival of the study of Dante, and with all of 
those other currents of literature which have en- 
riched our lives, and flow from his preaching and 
his awakening. 

The dignity which he gave to the individual with 
his call to awake and arise — this splendid call to per- 



SPEECH OF CAROLINE HAZARD 101 

sonality — sounded not only for men but for wo- 
men. " The whole realm of history and biography," 
he says, " is to increase my self-respect. Then I ven- 
ture ; then I will also essay to be." And it was to 
what has been called the misrepresented and neglected 
sex that this call came with perhaps especial em- 
phasis. It was a call to service. There were many 
women who were content with their daily round of 
duty, who found in it certainly all the room they 
could ask for self-denial; but the call to awaken 
to their own personality, to a conception of the 
worth of their own souls and the right that they 
had to live their own lives, — this call came with 
an especial force, as it seems to me, to the women 
of his day. We hope we have learned the lesson. 
There were some who carried the lesson farther 
than he ever intended, perhaps, but that call was 
a call which has aroused all that is best in the 
women of our land. Mr. Emerson himself, in his 
own beautiful and gracious life, in his association 
with women, recognized what the place of women 
could be in society and in the world. They had 
been too long merely pretty playthings. The young 
girl who ruled with an arbitrary authority for 
a brief hour, and then was consigned to house- 
hold cares, too often as a housekeeper rather than 
as a companion of her husband — all that Mr. 
Emerson saw, and in his own life showed how it 
need not be. The value of his women friends, the 
value of the women of his own household, he cher- 



102 THE EMERSON CENTENARY 

ished and in every way increased by his own gra- 
cious and loving deference and the dignity of his 
own character. And so his splendid message of the 
value of personality, is a gift for us women to be 
especially grateful for. 

And with that gift of the recognition of the value 
of the person came his recognition of the day, — the 
present moment, this hour, — whether the day came 
" in bud-crowned spring " or whether the day was — 

" Deformed and low, 
Short and bent by cold and snow." 

This day, this present moment, as he said, is the best 
day that ever was. He said that every day was a 
doomsday, a day to be filled with work, a day to be 
filled with all high endeavor. Who of us does not 
recall with a thrill of joy that wonderful poem of the 
"Daughters of Time,'' and the herbs and the apples 
which were taken, and the solemn scorn with which 
he saw the day turn and depart silent ? That splendid 
message comes to each one of us. And with the 
worth of the person and the value of the day came 
ever the sounding note of joy, — joy in the present, 
joy in life, joy in the world ! These are his flowers, 
his rhodora, his pine-trees, his beauty in these Con- 
cord meadows that we love and rejoice in. As for 
the deeper sources of that joy, how full and subtle 
the intimations are as they gleam on his pages. " Of 
that Ineffable Essence which we call Spirit," he says, 
" he who thinks most will say least." He could say 



SPEECH OF CAROLINE HAZARD 103 

with Sir Thomas Browne, "whoso feels not the 
warm gales and gentle ventilation of this Spirit, 
though I feel his pulse, I dare not say he lives, for 
truly without this there is to me no heat under the 
tropic nor any light, though I dwelt in the body of 
the sun." 

It was here in these Concord meadows that he 
taught us that man may have fellowship with God, — 
" that man in the bush with God may meet." This 
was the source of his joy ; this was the strength of 
his personality; this was the message which he 
preached to the men and women of his day, that 
over us 

** Soars the eternal sky 
Full of light and of Deity." 

The Chairman : Emerson had very little to do 
with the law, but he once got sued. A couple of 
scamps sold him a piece of land for his Walden 
garden, and another scamp undertook to contest the 
title, and the philosopher and poet had to become 
defendant in a suit. That was a good many years 
ago, and the lawyers were not perhaps then as bril- 
liant as they are now. If he had only had such a 
lawyer as we have here to-night, — the foremost 
member of the Suffolk Bar, — I think the result 
would have been very different. I am very happy to 
present to you Moorfield Storey, Esq. 



104 THE EMERSON CENTENARY 



SPEECH OF MOORFIELD STOREY 

Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen : — I 
might well hesitate in this company of his old friends 
and neighbors to speak of Emerson, for what can I 
say that is not already known to you all ? Nor is it 
easier to say the fitting word after all that you have 
heard to-day and all that many of you heard last 
night from lips that are far more eloquent than mine. 
I am encouraged, however, by the reflection that the 
better we love and honor a man, the more welcome 
is appreciation, even from strangers. We like to 
know that his quality was recognized by every one. 
I feel, however, a sense of personal obligation to 
your great teacher for the lesson that he taught me, 
and your Chairman's invitation came as a challenge 
to bear my testimony in recognition of my debt 
which I could not well refuse. I speak to-night, not 
as a contemporary and an equal, but simply as a 
representative of the yoimger generation which his 
words influenced profoundly. And I am glad that I 
have an opportunity, at this late hour of a long day 
spent in celebration, to speak briefly. I am satisfied 
that you will thank me for setting those who may 
come after me that good example. 

I well remember the evening, early in my college 
course, when I first met Mr. Emerson. It was at his 
own table, and I have never forgotten the grave and 
gracious simplicity of his manner. He appeared 



SPEECH OF MOORFIELD STOREY 105 

anxious rather to draw from me my opinions on the 
questions which he suggested than to express his 
own. Then and always he seemed to ask of each 
newcomer, " What have you to tell me ? " His atti- 
tude was that of a learner, and conveyed a subtle 
suggestion that the ideas of his visitor might be 
of interest to him, which was at once unexpected 
and delightful. A friend of mine, now an eminent 
philosopher, has confessed to me that he was so be- 
guiled by a similar appeal to himself at his first 
interview with Mr. Emerson that he launched into 
an exposition of his philosophic creed which, upon 
reflection, he felt must have been more interesting 
to himself than it was to his hearer. My memory 
retains the look and the gracious manner of my 
host, but, mercifully perhaps, does not recall my 

response. 

It was from the writings of Mr. Emerson, how- 
ever, that during our college life many of us learned 
our most valuable lessons. The vital thought which 
he thus expresses, — " Nature arms each man with 
some faculty which enables him to do easily some 
feat impossible to any other, and this makes him 
necessary to society," with its corollary that each is 
bound to discover what his faculty is, to develop it, 
and to use it for the benefit of mankind, was in itself 
a liberal education. It meant that every man, able 
or dull, superior or inferior, white, brown, or black, 
had his right to his chance of success, and it followed 
that no other man had a right to take that chance 



106 THE EMERSON CENTENARY 

away or to insist that his fellow man should be remade 
according to his ideas. He who has learned to be 
himself and to act upon his own convictions, regard- 
less of personal consequences, " safe in himself as in 
a fate," and who does this naturally and simply, not 
claiming praise for being what he is, any more than 
the plant asks praise for blooming, has grasped the 
highest conception of duty. 

Again, I learned from Mr. Emerson that the moral 
laws of the universe are as inexorable as the physical 
laws which govern the solar system, that they " ex- 
ecute themselves," that " in the soul of man there is 
a justice whose retributions are instant and entire. 
He who does a good deed is instantly ennobled. He 
who does a mean deed is by the action itself con- 
tracted. Thefts never enrich ; alms never impover- 
ish." 

He who really believes this has an abiding faith 
which will enable him to view without impatience 
the crooked workings of the world and to wait with 
serenity for the inevitable punishment which waits 
upon wrong and the certain triumph of right, con- 
tent to do his part while he may and indifferent to 
the insignificant question whether he lives to see the 
punishment and the triumph or not. Such seem to 
me in part Emerson's faith and his conception of 
duty, and happy he whose strength enables him to 
make them his own. 

Not merely, however, in the supreme moments of 
life, and in the great crises of human affairs, does 



SPEECH OF MOORFIELD STOREY 107 

Emerson help us. We may find in him a practical 
recognition of smaller troubles, and he teaches us, 
if not to avoid them, at least how to see them in 
their proper perspective. When, for example, we 
realize a long cherished ideal, and after a life of 
labor in the city, acquire a farm, we feel the truth 
of such words as these : — 

"If a man own land, the land owns him. . . . 
With brow bent, with firm intent the pale scholar 
leaves his desk to draw a freer breath, and get a 
juster statement of his thought in the garden walk. 
He stoops to pull up a purslain or a dock that is 
choking the young corn, and finds there are two ; 
close behind the last is a third ; he reaches out his 
hand to a fourth ; behind that are four thousand and 
one. He is heated and untuned, and by and by wakes 
up from his hideous dream of chickweed and redroot 
to remember his morning thought, and to find that 
with his adamantine purposes he has been duped by 
a dandelion. A garden is like those pernicious ma- 
chineries we read of every month in the newspapers, 
which catch a man's coat, skirt, or his hand, and 
draw in his arm, his leg, and his whole body to irre- 
sistible destruction." 

There is a profound truth in this statement which 
every man who has tried farming recognizes. If I 
were to criticise it at all, I should say that he under- 
estimates the number of weeds. 

While we are considering the relation between 
tariff and treaty, we may read with advantage such 



108 THE EMERSON CENTENARY 

passages as this : " Do not legislate. Meddle, and 
you snap the sinews with your sumptuary laws. Give 
no bounties ; make equal laws ; secure life and 
property, and you need not give alms." 

Against the panegyrics of war, which seem now to 
be the fashion, it is well to weigh his calm sentences : 

" It is the ignorant and childish part of mankind 
that is the fighting part. Idle and vacant minds want 
excitement, as all boys kill cats." ... In certain 
regions " of man, boy, or beast, the only trait that 
much interests the speaker is the pugnacious. And 
why? Because the speaker has as yet no other 
image of manly activity and virtue, none of endur- 
ance, none of perseverance, none of character, none 
of attainment of truth. Put him into a circle of 
cultivated men where the conversation broaches the 
great questions that besiege the human reason, and 
he would be dumb and unhappy as an Indian in 
church. ... If the search of the sublime laws of 
morals and the sources of hope and trust in man 
and not in books, in the present and not in the past, 
proceed ; if the rising generation can be provoked to 
think it unworthy to nestle into every abomination 
of the past, and shall feel the generous darings of 
austerity and virtue, then war has a short day, and 
human blood will cease to flow." 

Citizens of Concord, yours is a great inheritance. 
You breathe an inspiring air. You celebrate at fit- 
ting times the first scenes in a great struggle for 
human freedom. The Minuteman marks the spot 



SPEECH OF MOORFIELD STOREY 109 

where the shot was fired which startled the world. 
Are its echoes silent here ? Is your admiration spent 
on the statue, or does it extend to the cause for 
which the Minuteman died? Are the sons of your 
fathers indifferent to the struggles of other men for 
freedom? Are they content to stand silently by 
while their fellow citizens in this country are denied 
their equal rights ? Are they willing to help deprive 
another people of that liberty which is the birth- 
right of all human beings ? 

You meet to-day to celebrate the birth of Emerson* 
Why? Because he taught great truths, or uttered 
vain aspirations for impossible ideals ? Do you cele- 
brate dates and names with empty forms, or do you 
really believe in the truths which make those dates 
and names significant? One proof of living faith in 
those truths, of willingness to maintain them no 
matter at what personal cost, whether found in vote 
or speech or effective action, were worth a hundred 
monuments and a thousand celebrations. Is it the 
name or the reality which calls us together ? Are we 
trying to win honor for ourselves by professing to 
believe in the plain life and high thought which 
Emerson taught, or do we really believe? This is 
the question which this occasion asks us all, and 
only the conduct of our lives can answer it. 

The Chairman : — Your committee thought, not- 
withstanding the smallness of this room and the 
actual filling of it which you would make, that it 



110 THE EMERSON CENTENARY 

might be agreeable to invite — knowing they could 
not come — some of the distinguished foreigners 
who have so much admiration for Mr. Emerson and 
who were so friendly to him on his visit abroad. I 
have before me quite a package of the letters that 
they have sent in answer, all of them fortunately — 
inasmuch as we have but one vacant seat in the 
room — declining to come, and quite a number of 
them expressing a very high and exalted opinion 
both of the senders who do them this honor of invit- 
ing them, and of Mr. Emerson whom we are trying 
in this way to honor. However, I am not going to 
read these letters at this time. They will all be care- 
fully preserved for the use and good reading of the 
Social Circle at some future time.^ The vacant seat 
at this table was to have been occupied by a profes- 
sor of Glasgow University, which, as you know, gave 
Mr. Emerson a very large vote for the position — 
the highest in the college — of Lord Provost ; and 
although it did not elect him, fortunately for us, — 
as it might have taken him away more than we would 
have been willing, — he said of it that the voices of 
those young men were his fairest laurels. This gen- 
tleman. Professor Smith, was sent over here by the 
University to bear his tribute at this or some other 
of the celebrations in honor of Mr. Emerson ; but he 
is unfortunately in a hospital in Toledo, Ohio, instead 
of being here. But he has sent to Mr. Hoar his 
tribute, and Mr. Hoar will oblige me by reading it. 
^ See Appendix, page 131. 



LETTER READ BY SAMUEL HOAR 111 

Samuel Hoar : — Mr. Chairman, I received this 
to-day just before the afternoon celebration began. 
The length of that celebration prevented my present- 
ing it to the audience then. 

Mr. Hoar then read the following 

MEMORIAL.! 

"We, a few of the Scottish and English admirers 
of the late K. W. Emerson, and of his writings, 
desire to associate ourselves with those who are cele- 
brating in the United States his Centenary. We re- 
joice in the knowledge that his ethical teaching has 
so largely influenced to high and worthy aims the 
great nation to which he belonged, and we desire to 
testify how powerfully his teaching has affected 
for good very many in our own country. Many 
of his writings have been a life-long inspiration to 
people of the Anglo-Saxon nation all over the world. 

Rt. Hon. James Bktce, D. C. L., M. P. 

Principal Donaldson, of St. Andrews University. 
Principal Marshall Lang, Aberdeen University. 
Principal Story, Glasgow University. 
Rev. John Watson, D. D., of Liverpool (Ian Maclaren). 
Rev. John Kelman, M. A., Edinburgh. 
Rev. James Moffat, Dundonald, Ayrshire. 
Professor Walter Raleigh, Glasgow University. 
Rev. Hugh Black, M. A., Edinburgh. 
Mrs. Mary Drew (n6e Gladstone). 

^ See Appendix, page 131. 



112 THE EMERSON CENTENARY 

Miss Agnes C Maitland, Somerville College, Oxford. 
Professor Henry Goudy, D. C. L., Oxford. 
Professor J. G. McKendrick, Glasgow University. 
Professor S. Alexander, Owen's College, Manchester. 
Professor George Saintsbury, Edinburgh University. 
Professor George Adam Smith, Glasgow. 
Patrick W. Campbell, W. S., Edinburgh. 
Sir Leslie Stephen. 

Sir William Turner, Edinburgh University. 
Professor Marcus Dods, Edinburgh. 
Professor Latta, University, Glasgow. 
Professor A. V. Dicey, All Souls, Oxford. 
Professor Alexander Lawson, University, St. An- 
drews. 
Professor C. H. Herford, Manchester. 
Professor A. S. Pringle Pattison. 
Edmund Gosse, LL. D., London. 

The Chairman: — Rudyard Kipling declined his 
invitation, but we have his " Recessional " here to- 
night and we hope to have the pleasure of hearing 
Mr. Parker sing it. 

Kipling's " Recessional " was sung by Mr. George 
J. Parker, accompanied on the piano by Mrs. 
Charles Edward Brown. 

The Chaikman : — The gentleman who has per- 
haps honored the memory of Emerson by the grandest 
and most lasting memorial, and who proposed the 
plan for the Emerson Hall of Philosophy at Cam- 



SPEECH OF HUGO MUNSTERBERG 113 

bridge, at an expense of 1150,000, which sum he has 
already raised, is with us to-night, and we desire to 
thank him in this manner for the great service he 
has done for the memory of Emerson. I have plea- 
sure in introducing to you Professor Miinsterberg, of 
Harvard University. 



SPEECH OF HUGO MUNSTERBERG 

Mk. Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen : — The 
overwhelming kindness of your generous words, 
Mr. Chairman, adds much to the embarrassment with 
which I stand before you. I am deeply embarrassed 
indeed, — how can I, a foreigner, an outsider, rise at 
this occasion to speak to a circle of women and men, 
inspired from childhood by the atmosphere of Emer- 
son's New England ? I have been brought up near 
the Baltic Sea, and in my childhood the waves of 
the ocean seldom brought greetings from these New 
England shores to the shores of Germany. And yet 
my youth was not untouched by Emerson's genius. 
I am glad to mention this Emersonian influence 
abroad, because in the rich chord of the joyful enthu- 
siasm of this day I missed only one overtone : a tone 
bringing out the grateful appreciation which Emer- 
son found in the not-English speaking foreign coun- 
tries. As far as I remember, I had only three Amer- 
ican books, in German translation, in my little 
schoolday library. At ten I got a boys' edition of 
Cooper's L eather stocking ; at twelve I enjoyed 



114 THE EMERSON CENTENARY 

Longfellow's poems, but at fourteen I had Emerson's 
Essays. And they accompanied me through my stu- 
dent days ; I read and reread them, and he became 
thus the star to which I hitched my little wagon 
when it was to carry me to the new world from the 
fatherland. This was not without effect on my own 
American experiences. Emerson's work had so often 
represented to me the spirit of the new world which 
I entered that my mental eye became so sensitive as 
to recognize the Emersonian lines and curves and 
forms everywhere in the background of American 
life. Most Europeans, and especially Germans, who 
come over, see everywhere the features of commer- 
cialism and practical utilitarianism. I was impressed 
by the idealism of this young, healthful community, 
and in the first essay which I published on America, 
in a German paper, only a few months after my first 
visit, I wrote with most sincere conviction : "If 
you really want to understand the deepest energies 
of this glorious country, do not consult the editorials 
of the yellow press of New York, but read the 
golden books of the wise man of Concord." 

But, Mr. Chairman, I feel that I have no right to 
speak here as a German, since you have assured us 
that the foreign scholars have been invited for to- 
night, with the understanding that they are not 
allowed to come — if a cover has been laid for me, 
nevertheless, I take it that I was expected not to 
forget that I am here as the representative of the 
Harvard Philosophy Department. But, Mr. Chair- 



SPEECH OF HUGO MUNSTERBERG 115 

man, the Philosophy Department of Harvard has 
not to report any new facts to-night. The Emerson 
story is very simple, very short, and completely known 
to you. We saw a year ago that the time had come 
to place an Emerson Hall for Philosophy on the 
Harvard Yard, and that it was necessary for that 
purpose to collect 1150,000 before the 25th of May, 
1903 ; we began thus to collect, and when we counted 
the contents of our purse, on the 23d of May, 1903, 
we found there 1150,250. That is the whole simple 
story indeed, and yet some connotations to it may 
be in order, and I am most happy to make them 
in this company. 

First, do not misunderstand the report of our 
treasurer ; the sum I mentioned was meant from the 
beginning merely as a fund sufficient to secure a 
building, — not at all sufficient to secure the building 
for which we were hoping from the start. We want 
a spacious, noble, monumental hall — the architec- 
tural plans are drawn. To build it as the plans sug- 
gest it we need 1100,000 more; and while we 
highly appreciate any small gifts toward this addi- 
tional sum we are firmly determined not to reject 
even the largest contributions. 

But all this refers to the externals, to the news- 
paper side of our memorial work ; let me speak in 
this narrower circle of some more internal points. 
Seen from such an exoteric point of view, it may 
look as though we Harvard philosophers had said 
through all the year : " Happy public, you are fortu- 



116 THE EMERSON CENTENARY 

nate in being allowed to build a fine building for our 
splendid philosophy instruction, and now that the 
checks are written, the public may kindly remove 
itself and the students may fill their fountain pens 
to write down in the new building our glorious effu- 
sion of wisdom." Well, over there in Cambridge, 
we must impose on the freshmen and sophomores, 
but here let me say at once, we know exactly that 
the generous contributions of the community were 
not given to us but to Emerson. And if we ever 
forgot it, our benefactors reminded us of it. I asked, 
for instance, the help of Andrew Carnegie, and he 
gave generously, but when I replied that there would 
be rejoicing in Harvard that at last he had given to 
Harvard University, — I saw in the far background 
the big Harvard Library building we need so badly, — 
he left me not the slightest doubt that his pledge 
was for the Emerson Memorial, but not for Harvard 
as Harvard. Yes, it is thoroughly an Emerson build- 
ing, a late expression of Harvard's gratitude for her 
greatest son. 

But we know also that the value of this memorial 
gift lies not in its walls and roof, but in the kind of 
work which will develop within those walls. It will 
be a true Emerson memorial only if the words and 
work in that hall become help and guidance, wisdom 
and inspiration for new and new generations of Har- 
vard men. There would be no hope of such influence 
if we instructors really entered into it with an air 
of self-satisfaction and self-complacency. Let me 



SPEECH OF HUGO MUNSTERBERG 117 

assure you that it is exactly the opposite feeling with 
which we look into the future, and this conviction 
that we must fulfil our duty better, much better, 
than heretofore, is common to all of us in the whole 
large Department of Philosophy. A lucky chance 
brought to me this morning, when I left for Concord, 
a letter from our colleague, Professor Royce, who is 
spending his sabbatical year in the country of his 
childhood, in California. He finds the fit word bet- 
ter than I could hope to do ; let me read from his 
letter. I had written to him that the success seems 
near, and he replies : — 

" I feel very deeply how great are the responsi- 
bilities which the new gift places upon the shoulders 
of each teacher of the department which is thus 
endowed. I do not know how much I shall be able 
to do to live up to these new responsibilities. I only 
know that the news of the success of the Emerson 
Hall endowment fills me with a desire not only to 
improve here and there, but quite to make over 
afresh, and to change throughout for the better, my 
methods of work as a teacher of philosophy; and 
with a determination to devote myself as never be- 
fore to the task of offering to philosophy and to 
Harvard my best services. That the founding of this 
new building may mean the beginning of a new life 
for philosophical study in our country, and the dawn- 
ing of a new day for the interests of higher thought 
in our national affairs, is the earnest wish of your 
absent colleague." 



118 THE EMERSON CENTENARY 

This is the feeling of our common department's 
soul. We shall not enter the new Philosophy Hall 
with the feeling that we can sit there on our laurels, 
but with the firm promise that we will live up to the 
duties which the single word above its door demands 
from us. We all are united by the ideal to make 
our work in Emerson Hall worthy of the name that 
honors it. 

Mr. Chairman, I see from your pretty menu-card 
that Emerson once said, " Harvard University is 
thin like a wafer compared with the solid land of 
our Social Circle in Concord." That was sixty years 
ago, and there has not been much change since that 
time, indeed. But now the change will come, believe 
us. Emerson Hall in Harvard University will be 
built on solid land, too, on the solid land of our best 
will and effort, and we will work that it may prove 
perhaps even not less solid than the Social Circle, — 
solid land on which to stand to-night gave me the 
greatest possible pleasure. 

The Chairman : — Dr. Emerson needs no intro- 
duction from me to you. He will occupy the few 
remaining moments before the time to leave for 
the train, and the exercises will then close with 
singing the "Battle Hymn" to the tune of "Old 
Hundred." 



SPEECH OF EDWARD WALDO EMERSON 119 



SPEECH OF EDWARD WALDO EMERSON 

Mr. Chairman, My Honored Friend, — My 
Friends and Neighbors: — The Social Circle, as 
stated in its book of chronicles, was not merely 
founded "for the diffusion of useful communica- 
tions " by the twenty -five members who composed it, 

— some of which might be shared by their wives and 
some not, — but for the promotion of the social affec- 
tions, that they should not die. I am glad to see 
how liberally the Circle has gone to work to promote 
them by such a thoroughly social and affectionate 
and catholic occasion as this. 

Now, it makes me smile a little when, after the 
exercises that I have had the privilege of attending 
here and elsewhere, I think of a remark that I have 
so often heard my father make. My mother was 
constantly remembering that "Ten years ago to-day 
such a thing occurred," and other members of the 
family would remember other anniversaries. When 
at table such remarks were made, my father would 
often laugh and say, " Oh, it is always a hundred 
years from something." But he was so good a towns- 
man and he had such an affectionate regard for his 
neighbors — and he construed that term very largely 

— that if we can conceive of him being present and 
receiving such a tribute as has been given to him 
to-day, it is very clear how it would have affected 
him. Some of you are too young — or too young 



120 THE EMERSON CENTENARY 

Concordians — to remember the burning of his house 
as far as the heroic mustering of his friends would 
allow it to be burned, for they, some of whom I see 
here to-night, at the risk of their lives, prevented the 
entire destruction and saved all his effects. Well, 
his friends had sent him abroad to restore his health, 
and he was coming home, and word had gone out 
that the steamer had come in, and the engineer was 
instructed to toot the whistle as the train came down 
the grade from Walden Woods if Mr. Emerson was 
on board, and the bells were ringing and the people 
gathered at the depot. Mr. Emerson was carried 
homeward delighted, under a triumphal arch, sur- 
rounded by his neighbors, with the school-children 
marching alongside, but he supposed in good faith 
that all this was a tribute to my sister Ellen. He 
did not realize that it was for him. But when after 
passing beneath a triumphal arch, he came to his 
own door, and found the house just as he had left 
it, with hardly a trace of the injury, and his study 
just as it was before, with, all the books there, and 
then saw the waiting throng of friends and neigh- 
bors around his gate, it suddenly came over him 
what it meant. He sped down the marble walk to 
the gate, — I cannot say all that he said; it was but 
a few words, for the meaning of it all swept over 
him. He began, "My friends and neighbors! lam 
not wood nor stone." He articulated but a few 
words, but he made his meaning clear. And so we, 
his family, feel to-day. 



SPEECH OF EDWARD WALDO EMERSON 121 

Now, what was the reason, though not born in 
Concord, though a scholar living apart, though fol- 
lowing his own lines regardless of other people's 
ideas, has caused him to be considered, first, as 
crazy, and then as atheistic, and then the charge 
resolved itself into pantheism, and then it became 
merely mysticism, and finally he was accepted, — 
what was the reason that he was accepted? It was 
for two reasons. In the first place, he never fought. 
He simply announced his message. He was a her- 
ald; he announced the word that was given to him, 
and it was not his part to defend it. The truth, he 
believed, would defend itself. There was no pugnac- 
ity in him. The truth needed no defence. He sim- 
ply left it to work its own way, and so he aroused 
no opposition. In the second place, while finding 
good in all things, he saw even in the fierce and 
ferocious wars of the Middle Ages and the institu- 
tions of feudalism, this benefit, that it was a proof 
of the gentleman that he carried his life in his hands 
and was ready to answer for his word with his life, 
— it was exactly that which Mr. Emerson did : he 
answered for his words with his life. Many persons 
were not reading his words in those days; only a 
few were; but his life was before the people, and 
those who had read his words also came to see his 
life, and finding his life humble and serene and 
sweet and expectant and hopeful, they became his 
friends. He made friends everywhere as the sun in 
heaven makes friends. 



122 THE EMERSON CENTENARY 

But while he was an idealist, this story is told of 
him by a friend, that when the philosophers who 
were visiting him were discoursing in his study, a 
load of wood arrived for him and he said to them, 
" Excuse me, for a moment ; we have to attend to 
these things just as if they were real." And so 
when his duty to his town and his country and his 
globe came up, he attended to those duties as if 
they were real. He went to town meeting, although 
his neighbor on the hill advised him not to go be- 
cause " what you do with the ballot is no use — it 
won't stay so; but what you do with the gun stays 
done." But he went to town meeting, and I want 
to recall one word that he said. It is a good politi- 
cal tract, and very short. He said, " What business 
have you to stay away from the polls because you 
are paired off with a man who means to vote 
wrong? How shall you, who mean to vote right, 
be excused from staying away? Suppose the three 
hundred Spartans at Thermopylae had paired off 
with an equal number of Persians. Would it have 
been the same to history? Would it have been 
the same to Greece? Would it have been the same 
to the world?" This morning, in the singing of 
the Ode at the town hall, I missed two verses. 
The time was short and they were therefore left out, 
but they were lasting truths that he announced — as 
true from 1898 to 1903 and onward as in the dark 
days of the Civil War. These were the omitted 
verses : — 



SPEECH OF EDWARD WALDO EMERSON 123 

" United States ! The ages plead, — 
Present and past in under-song, — 
Go put your creed into your deed, 
Nor speak with double tongue. 

" For sea and land don't understand, 
Nor skies without a frown 
See rights for which the one hand fights 
By the other cloven down." 

Now, to turn to a more entertaining aspect of our 
subject, perhaps, I wish to tell two stories which 
were connected with the little book I wrote about 
my father, but which came to me too late to go into 
the book. I will try to make them brief, but they 
seem to me very delightful. Our good neighbor, 
Mr. Bowers, whom many of you remember, who 
lived on Heywood Street by the brook, — a patriot 
who always spoke so well in the temperance meet- 
ings and the Anti-slavery and Kansas meetings that 
my father, very humble about his own eloquence, 
always came home saying, "Bowers spoke admir- 
ably; " — when the war came shouldered his gun as 
a private in the three months' men, and afterwards 
served as captain throughout the war with credit. 
From various troubles, owing to the war, Mr. 
Bowers's reason was affected, and he was confined 
in Danvers Asylum willingly. But he did not for- 
get his principles, and instantly set himself to make 
the life of the inmates as tolerable as he could. He 
would write to my sister and myself, asking if we 
would please send him some books, — "Why, the 



124 THE EMERSON CENTENARY 

people here haven't any books to read, and they 
would be a great comfort to them." When my me- 
morial volume about my father came out, he wrote 
me and said, "I have no money, but will you send 
me your book?" and then wrote me such a letter 
that I said, "No price that has as yet been paid for 
that book has even approached the price you have 
paid for it." Mr. Bowers was a nephew of George 
Minott, who lived on the hill opposite my father's. 
Mr. Bowers was one day talking with his uncle, — 
an old agriculturalist and pot-hunter, who had only 
been to Boston once, when he marched there in 
1812 with his gun and then he got so homesick 
for Concord that he promptly deserted ; — as they 
stood there talking together, my father came out 
from his study with his tall hat on and his satchel 
in hand, going to Boston for the day. He paused 
as he reached the middle of that dusty diagonal 
leading to the upper sidewalk, as you know, and 
was apparently lost in meditation. They supposed 
he was meditating some profound problem. Un- 
doubtedly, the problem was whether or no he had 
done with a certain book which should be carried 
back to the Athenaeum. But Mr. Minott said to 
Mr. Bowers, "Charley, that man ain't like other 
men. He is like Enoch. He walks with God and 
talks with his angels." I am sometimes tempted to 
ask how many graduates of Harvard College would 
know who Enoch was.^ 

1 Mr. Samuel Hoar, on behalf of the University, officially 



SPEECH OF EDWARD WALDO EMERSON 125 

The other story was this. Mr. Bowers was tem- 
porarily curator of the Lyceum. The minister of a 
neighboring town, who had a sonorous voice which 
he, with others, enjoyed, and a florid style of rheto- 
ric, was to have lectured, but was unexpectedly de- 
tained. Mr. Bowers came down to ask Mr. Emerson 
if he would read something. Mr. Emerson said: 
"Yes; I could read you something; but will the 
people who are assembled to hear the sound of the 
trumpet be content with a penny whistle ? " 

Mr. Emerson's love for his townsfolk, especially 
for the boys and girls, was very great. How little 
conscious was the boy, as he passed the gate, riding 
a horse to be shod, or the girls walking to school, — 
how little conscious of the admiration that they 
excited in him and his pleasure in watching them 
pass. He had a little book which he called Auto 
among his manuscripts in which he noted a few 
points especially characteristic of himself. One 
thins: he wrote was, "I have never seen a man that 
could not teach me something. I always felt that 
in some point he was my master." It was so with 
women and with children. We had once a friend, 
a charming young girl, visiting us at our house. 
One morning, through some family exigency, she 
was alone at breakfast with Mr. Emerson and 
poured out his cup of coffee for him. She felt very 
much abashed. She felt unable to discourse on 

informs me that Harvard students are familiar with Enoch 
because he was translated some time ago. 



126 THE EMERSON CENTENARY 

philosophy, but she said it suddenly came over her, 
"Mr. Emerson could not fix over an old dress, he 
could not do plain sewing the way I can do it, to 
save his life." Then she felt better, and they got 
on together beautifully after that. I wish she had 
said it to him ; it would have delighted him. When 
1 was in college many persons used to come to ask 
Mr. Emerson questions, — young people often no 
older than I. But you know how it is; boys are not 
apt to ask their fathers questions. They ask some 
other person's father. I was surprised to see how 
the boys who came there did so. I seldom asked a 
very serious question of him, but I recall one 
answer with pleasure. It was about Immortality. 
I ventured to ask what he thought. This was the 
answer : — "I think we may be sure that, whatever 
may come after death, no one will be disappointed." 
That seemed to cover all our concern about the 
future. 

My father's delight in his farm and what he found 
in it — except the weeds — has already been men- 
tioned. I like to close with this incident, because, 
you know, in the pictures of the good men and 
women who have been canonized, they are repre- 
sented with some emblem, — a book or a wheel or 
a cross or a sword, as an attribute. David Scott, 
the Edinburgh painter, has this one merit in that 
wooden picture that he made of my father, in that 
he recognized that my father stood for Hope, and he 
put the rainbow in the background — the symbol of 



SPEECH OF EDWAED WALDO EMERSON 127 

hope. Mr. Emerson, finding everything good in 
Concord, and near at hand in his home, wrote this : — 

" The sun athwart the cloud thought it no sin 
To use my land to put his rainbow in." 

The evening closed with the "Concord Hymn" 
sung to the tune of "Old Hundred," in which all 
present were asked to join. 



128 THE EMERSON CENTENARY 



CONCORD HYMN : 

SUNG AT THE COMPLETION OF THE BATTLE MONUMENT, 
APRIL 19, 1836. 

By the rude bridge that arched the flood, 
Their flag to April's breeze unfurled, 

Here once the embattled farmers stood, 
And fired the shot heard round the world. 

The foe long since in silence slept ; 

Alike the conqueror silent sleeps ; 
And Time the ruined bridge has swept 

Down the dkrk stream which seaward creeps. 

On this green bank, by this soft stream. 

We set to-day a votive stone ; 
That memory may their deed redeem, 

When, like our sires, our sons are gone. 

Spirit, that made those heroes dare 
To die, and leave their children free, 

Bid Time and Nature gently spare 
The shaft we raise to them and thee. 



APPENDIX 



APPENDIX 

Professor George Adam Smith of Glasgow, who was 
unexpectedly prevented from attending the dinner of the 
Social Circle, writes, under date of May 23, 1903 : — 

" I had hoped to get to Concord to represent my coun- 
try at the great memorial of one as highly honoured with 
us as with you. ... I enclose the letter from Scottish 
(and a few English) admirers of Mr. Emerson. The 
number could easily have been quadrupled." 

In sending his signature to the letter mentioned by Pro- 
fessor Smith, Sir Leslie Stephen wrote to Mr. Campbell : 

" I should be proud to think that any value could be 
attached to my expression of respect and admiration for 
Emerson. No man of his time, I think, had a loftier or 
purer character, or did more to raise the intellectual level 
of his contemporaries. ... I can never read his writings 
without being, for the time at least, a better man." 

Among the letters referred to by the Chairman were 

the following : — 

Kbvue DBS Deux Mondes, 
Cabinet du Dikectbur 15, Rub de l'Univebsite, 

LuNDi ET Vendredi Pabis, le 2 Mai 1903. 

de 3 1 5 HEURES. 

M. F. Brunetiere serait heureux, tant en son nom per- 
sonnel que comme directeur de la Revue des Deux Mondes 



132 APPENDIX 

si les circonstances lui avaient permis de prendre part au 
Banquet que le Social Circle de Concord va c^l^brer en 
I'honneur du grand penseur Amdricain: Ralph Waldo 
Emerson. 

Mais s'il est priv^ du plaisir d'y assister il tient h. t&- 
moigner de son admiration pour celui qui sera le hdros de 
cette fete et il prie M. le President Keyes de vouloir bien 
etre I'interpr^te de ses sentiments. 

30 Hyde Park Gate, London. 
April 30, 1903. 

Dr. Stanton Coit begs to thank the Social Circle in Con- 
cord for their kind invitation to the banquet on May 25th. 
He regrets that he cannot be present, but although so far 
away he is doing what he can to celebrate the anniversary 
of Emerson's birthday. A special service will be held on 
Sunday, May 24, at the West London Ethical Society in 
memory of Emerson when Dr. Coit will deliver a com- 
memoration address on Emerson. 

John S. Keyes, Esq. 

4 Lavebockbanb: Road, Edinbubgh. 
May 8, 1903. 
John S. Keyes, Esq. 

Dear Sir: — I beg to thank you, and through you 
the " Social Circle of Concord," for the great honour done 
me in inviting me to the banquet on the centenary of Mr. 
Emerson's birthday. I am only sad that as an octogena- 
rian, I am now too old to undertake all that my attendance 
in Concord would mean. 

I know not that I ever met on earth a man of the no- 
bility of Emerson : it was a moral exaltation simply to 
have seen him. That I did see him has been one of the 



APPENDIX 133 

calms of my life : reverence and love always accompany 
my memory of the evening I spent with him. 

It will always be a joy to know that I was associated 
with those five hundred Glasgow University Student Voices 
which Mr. Emerson himself spoke of as his "Fairest 
Laurel." 

I do hope you and the Circle will readily sympathize 
with me in my sorrow not to be present on such a memor- 
able occasion of the honouring of Emerson. 

Wishing you and the Circle the full joy of success on 
that auspicious May twenty-fifth, I am, 
Most respectfully. 

Yours and theirs, 

James Hutchison Stirling. 



30 Newbattle Tekkace, Edinbubgh. 
14 May, 1903. 

Dear Sir : — I have to thank you very heartily for 
your kind invitation to the banquet which the " Social 
Circle in Concord " are to give on the 25th inst., in honour 
of Emerson's centenary. 

It is a real pleasure to me to hear of this banquet in 
memory of my Uncle's much loved and highly appreciated 
friend ; and it is with deep regret that I have to decline 
the invitation to be present, so kindly tendered me, on the 
grounds of distance from Concord and my many engage- 
ments. But tho' absent in body, I shall be with you in 
spirit on the memorable twenty-fifth of May, and heartily 
wish success to the celebration. 

With many thanks and kind wishes, 

1 am, yours sincerely, 

Alex. Carlyle. 
John S. Keyes, Esq., 

Concord, U. S. A. 



134 APPENDIX 

Balliol College, 
May 3, 1903. 

Dear Sir : — Will you express to the members of the 
Social Circle of Concord my great regret that I cannot ac- 
cept theii' kind invitation. Emerson teaches us not to lay 
too much weight on the conditions of time and space, but 
they sometimes come in one's way in the details of prac- 
tice. I heartily sympathize with you in doing honour to 
one who has done so much to elevate the tone of literature 
and to encourage ideal ways of thinking among all Eng- 
lish speaking people. 

I am much obliged to the Social Circle for the kindness 
of this invitation. I am, 

Very respectfully, 

E. Caird. 



House of Commons, 
May 7, 1903. 

Dear Sir : — Permit me to thank the members of the 
Social Circle in Concord for their very kind invitation to 
be present at the banquet to be held on the hundredth 
anniversary of the birth of the most illustrious citizen of 
Concord, and to express my sincere regret that it is impos- 
sible for me to leave England at present, and have the 
pleasure of attending this celebration. I had the honour 
and pleasure of knowing Mr. Emerson, and retain the 
most vivid recollection of the charm of his manner and 
conversation. No life and no character better deserves 
to be commemorated by the people of New England than 
his does. Believe me. 

Very faithfully yours, 

James Brtce. 

Chairman of the Committee. 



APPENDIX 135 

University cbf Edinburgh, 
May 19, 1903. 

Dear Sir : — I must apologize for the delay in reply- 
ing to your most kind invitation to the banquet of the 
" Social Circle in Concord '* on May twenty-fifth, the an- 
niversary of the birthday of its most distinguished mem- 
ber, Kalph Waldo Emerson. The delay was caused by 
my absence on the continent, my letters not being for- 
warded. 

It would have given me the greatest pleasure, had it 
been possible, to be present at your banquet in the flesh, 
as I shall certainly be in the spirit, on Monday night. 
The spell of Emerson's home does not lose its power as 
the years go by, and I have myself had the great pleasure 
of visiting the scenes round which his memory clings, and 
others in your beautiful Concord. 

May I ask you to be so kind as to convey to the other 
members of your " Social Circle " my regrets that I can- 
not avail myself of the invitation with which you have 
honoured me. 

Believe me, 

Yours sincerely, 

James Seth. 
John S. Keyes, Esq., 
Concord, Mass. 



Palermo, 
5 Maggio, 1903. 

Ill"^°. Sig'^. Presidente : — Dolente di non potere assis- 
tere al simposio che cotesto Circolo Sociale terra in onore 
del grande idealista Ralph Waldo Emerson nel centesimo 
anniversario della sua nascita, prego Lei Signor John S. 
Keyes di volermi rappresentare in tale fausta ricorrenza 



136 APPENDIX 

e di voler porgere ai socii tutti di cotesto nobile Sodalizio 
il mio afEettuoso saluto nel nome dell' immortale pensatore, 
le cui opere sono il mio vademecum e il porto nel quale is 
raccoglie il mio spirito sconf ortato dallo scetticismo in- 
vadente. 

Le stringo fraternamente la mano 
n suo devotissimo, 

Andrea Lo Forte Randi. 



In addition to the foregoing letters, formal expressions 
of regret for their inability to be present were received 
from the following : — 

Giosub Carducci, Bologna. 

Professor A. V. Dicey, All Souls College, Oxford. 

Shadworth H. Hodgson, London. 

Rudyard Kipling, Sussex, England. 

Sir Frederick Pollock, London. 

Herbert Spencer, Brighton, England. 

Bernard Bosanquet, Oxshott, Surrey, England. 



THE SOCIAL CIRCLE IN CONCORD 



MAY, 1903 



John Shepabd Kbtes 
Julius Michael Smith 
Henry Francis Smith 
Edward Waldo Emerson 
William Henry Hunt 
David Goodwin Lang 
Alfred Munroe 
Prescott Keyes 
Woodward Hudson 
EicHARD Fay Barrett 
Edward Jarvis Bartlett 
Charles Edward Brown 
William Henry Brown 



Henry Dingley Coolidge 

William Lorenzo Eaton 

John Leach Gilmore 

Samuel Hoar 

George Eugeitb Titcomb 

William Wheeler 

LoREN Benjamin Macdonald 

Stedman Buttrick 

Harvey Wheeler 

Francis Augustine Houston 

Thomas Holms 

Russell Robb 

Frederic Alcott Pratt 



Adams Tolman 

CENTENARY COMMITTEES 

Executive 

Samuel Hoab 
• LoREN Benjamin Macdonald Thomas Hollis 
William Lorenzo Eaton Edward Jarvis Bartlett 

On the Dinner 

John Shepard Keyes 
John Leach Gilmore Richard Fay Barrett 

Charles Edward Brown Woodward Hudson 



On Publication 

Frederic Alcott Pratt 
William Lorenzo Eaton 



Woodward Hudson 



1 



AUG 31 1003 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 




012 073 149 A 







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